Not The Hero
by Alara Rogers
Summary: Discord meets a human-in-Equestria Seventh Element. Except there is no such thing as a Seventh Element. When the Big Hero the world believes in is a universe-warping villain, sometimes a villain must step up to become a hero. Mocks the concept of Gary Stu, but not a comedy, and may get quite dark.
1. Discord's Journal

In the event of the not-inconsiderable possibility that I should end up dead, turned to stone again, or transformed into some absolutely cliched and utterly humorless Evil Avatar of Pure Evilness, thereafter to suffer one of the aforementioned fates, I am writing my observations down, in hopes that someday, somepony might figure out what's actually going on here, and perhaps even be able to fight back. Although it seems quite unlikely, given the fall of two (possibly three, if Moonie counts separately) alicorns and the wielders of the Elements of Harmony and the inescapable fact that, if I should fall as well... put it this way, those two alicorns fought me with everything they had and until they found their pile of crystal fruit to stone me with, I laughed off everything they tried. So if _I_ fall, I'm really not hopeful for the future of ponykind. Oh, you'll all live, except for those of you who don't, but your lives won't be your own anymore. You'll be puppets on a stage, dancing for the glory of an alien, and you won't even know it.

But it's not in my nature to go down quietly. I may not survive this, but at the very least, I'm going to do my best to ensure that _somepony_ hears from me after I'm gone.

What a strange thought. Me, gone. I have quite the imagination, but I'm having a hard time picturing that one. Bad enough to be locked in stone, but to be gone? Forever? Dead, or twisted into something I'm not? It's... not a possibility I'm looking forward to, but sticking my head in the sand and pretending it can't possibly happen isn't going to work this time. And to think how well that strategy has served me so far! Ah well, I'm change, sooner or later I had to change tactics, right? Or they'll be changed for me.

As fond as I am of radical social transformation, the thought of someone altering the cultural mores of a society for no better reason than the gratification of their personal base lusts rather offends me. Also, the notion that the most dire threat to Equestria, the worst villain any pony has ever faced, far more insidious and powerful than myself, is prancing around (well, not literally, he's a biped) basking in the soppy glow of _friendship_ and _love_ and all that jazz, things no pony could ever be bothered to extend to me (not that I _wanted_ such mushy pap in my life, but I'd have liked the opportunity to say no, at least)... well, I must confess, that rustles my jimmies something fierce. Plus, he's a moron. Seriously. The thought that Celestia, Luna and Twilight Sparkle, all mares who beat _me_ on occasion, should have fallen to this uncreative numbskull who doesn't even know what his power actually is... now that depresses me. And I am entirely too cheerful a fellow to suffer depression! So I'm going to do something about it.

And if I fail, which I probably will, I hold some hope that perhaps somepony will read this account and see my nemesis for what he is.

It's not, you understand, that I had any intention of risking my life to save ungrateful ponies from mind control (and possibly involuntary retroactive sex change, or possibly banishment to nonexistence... I'm not sure which. Math is boring!) If I had a choice... well, if I had a choice, I'd be running for my life. There are other worlds out there, other dimensions beyond the veil of this reality, and I'm sure I could be very happy kicking back with a lemon milkshake and generating glorious chaos in one of them. But that's not an option. He's closed the dimensional gates to any but his homeworld, and I know perfectly well that if I go _there_ I'll just be playing into his immature fantasies in a different way. And if I try to run and hide... well, that doesn't suit my nature. It will be child's play for him to warp me into wanting to carry out some ridiculously stupid revenge plot so he can be a Big Hero and destroy me. So I have no choice. As long as my mind is my own, I have to fight back, because if I don't fight at all, my mind won't be my own anymore.

(Oh, I can _hear_ you ponies rolling your eyes and calling me a hypocrite. Pff, as if you can judge. Do you know I counted no less than 27 reforming spells in the spellbooks held in the library in Ponyville? Either your great and noble librarian heroine has a bit of a fetish there, or ponies think mind control is just good clean fun as long as the end result is harmonious. For that matter, why are there no pretty glass windows showing Celestia holding puppet strings with ponies dancing on them? Simple: history's written by the winners, and a thousand years and some change ago, I lost. But if you think she hasn't played puppetmaster _far_, far more often than moi, you simply haven't been paying attention, dear reader.)

To be honest, this isn't actually the first time I've played the role of hero for ungrateful ponies who never knew or acknowledged what I did. During my days as Lord Sovereign Designated Driver of Equestria, I dealt with quite a few threats to my ponies, since the operative word there was _my_ ponies, and sharing my toys with other would-be conquerors... see now, sharing's always struck me as far too harmonious an activity for my tastes. Not really something I'm fond of doing. I can be a very generous Banana Sandwich if I choose, but I can't think of a single entity that tried to conquer Equestria, or part of Equestria, that asked me nicely if they could borrow some ponies for their slave mines or something. I'd probably have said no if they _did_ ask nicely, but I might have let them go home without permanently damaging their sanity if they'd shown me just a little bit of etiquette. Most such threats were utterly pathetic, an enjoyable hour or day or week delivering a most humorous smackdown on whatever creature dared to challenge me. Dragons invading and taking ponies for food? Note the lack of a Dragon Empire any longer! Diamond Dogs looking for slaves? Ever notice how incredibly stupid Diamond Dogs are? Zompony apocalypse? Okay, that one was my fault in the first place.

But there were a few occasions when I was up against something in my own weight class. Like the time that my apprentice in the ways of Chaos tried to sacrifice me to the Outer Gods, and managed to open a portal to their realm that _I_ ended up having to close. (Celestia and Luna might have helped just a bit with that.) Or the time that the Avatar of Order decided that it was too much work regulating magic, and things would be so much more orderly here if we lived in a standard heliocentric system and actually paid attention to the laws of physics and had _no more magic_, and yours truly bravely challenged a counterpart of equal power to preserve magic in our world. And that time with Grogar. Not that ponies know anything about any of this, and it's not as if I've gone around demanding that ponies give me medals and stained glass windows for _my_ acts of heroism, or even acknowledged that they happened... because I'm well aware of who I am to them. I'm Chaos, and Chaos is always bad.

This time, though... this time what I'm fighting is well above my weight class. You wouldn't think so to look at him. He's so... _pathetic_ looking. So... bland. How can you possibly be the only example of your species on an entire planet and yet be so unbelievably boring in appearance? And the visible powers he demonstrates _really_ shouldn't do more than inconvenience me.

It's the powers you don't see that are the danger. The powers he doesn't even realize he has. The powers he has _mind-raped_ eight mares with, and I use that term intentionally, because making a mare who envisions herself the very epitome of generosity fall in obsessive, jealous love with a giant boulder she thinks is a giant diamond is just pure hilarity, but making ponies love _you_ because you have an itch you need scratching is _foul_. The powers he has altered the very face of Equestria with. And the powers he's going to kill me with, if I make the slightest mistake in dealing with him.

Ponies call me a god, but I'm not. At best I'm a demiurge. Some creator entity made the universe and left all these wonderful building blocks around; I just play with them. They call me a reality warper, but I'm not that either. Sure, I can make up become down while I'm thinking about it, but it is very, very hard for me to make permanent alterations to reality and they can't be on the order of "rewrite the fundamental laws of magic and the functioning of the Avatars" or "change pony culture completely, overnight". I'm a _very_, very powerful, very adept magic user, but there's no one effect I've caused that Twilight Sparkle couldn't pull off for herself if she tried; she just can't do all of them at once like I can. (Well, possibly she can't remove her head and turn it into a balloon. I've never seen a unicorn, or even an alicorn, pull that one off.)

The creature I'm up against is a god. But the worst kind. The kind that doesn't know what it is.

At least I _know_ I'm a villain.

I've delayed too long, I fear; I feel a strange pressure on my mind, a red-hazed hatred for my opponent (deserved, but still! I don't _do_ mindless hatred!), an increasing compulsion to plot some sort of horrific revenge. His powers are working on me and even I can't stand against them for long. I can only stand against them at all because I know they exist. Those poor, poor stupid little ponies, they had no chance at all.

I'm going to fight to save them and they'll most likely hate me and put me in stone for it if I even survive, and that's probably a best case scenario, and I...

I'm scared. I never thought I'd see the day when I'd admit that to anypony. I don't entirely know why I'm admitting it now.

Maybe because my opponent wants me to be nothing but a mustachio-twirling evildoer (haha for him! I have a goatee, not a mustache!) He wants to reduce me to nothing but my function in the story of his Grand And Glorious Adventure in Equestria, make me into nothing but a hateful antagonist, and, well, ponies will go along with that, because that's who I am to them already. And I never cared before that they are completely ignorant of the concept that I have thoughts and feelings of my own, because who needs sympathy? I'm here to spread disharmony! I don't need sopping wet _compassion_ or _empathy_, I need some laughs and you've got a face I can laugh at!

But I'm more than that. I always have been. I'm... I'm not a pony, but I am a _person_. A living, sentient being, like you, like the baby dragon that my enemy is ignoring and maybe I can actually use this, like a zebra, like any creature you talk to. I have emotions. And if I'm going to lose all that, if I'm going to be turned into a cardboard cariacture of myself, and it may well happen... I want somepony to know, that isn't me. That's a story some asinine monkey told himself about me, and because he has the power to change reality with his thoughts and desires, that's what he's going to try to turn me into. I want somepony to know... I'm no hero, I'm quite happy being the villain most days of the week, because the only thing I like about any of you is how much fun you are to tease and play with, but I'm going up against something much more powerful than I am, to try to save all of you from him, and I'm scared. I don't want to die. I don't want to lose my identity and become a shadow of myself. I don't want to forget the true nature of Chaos and start acting like I consider every mistake in the Evil Overlord Manual to be a blueprint to follow. I don't want to be forcibly converted into a harmonious alicorn pony with a completely different name and mission in life. And I'd kind of like to avoid turning to stone for another millennium.

But I also don't want to live in a world where every single pony life has been warped to serve the egotistical needs of an idiot who thinks his life story is the only important one to tell and he should be the only hero in the universe. That doesn't sound fun at all. And, as I've mentioned, I don't think I have the option of running away anyway.

So here I go. If this journal ends here, then I lost, because if I win I'll probably destroy this journal. If I survive whatever this next encounter is, and I don't win, I'll be back to write some more.

Toodles!


	2. A Tragic Tail

Oh chaos above this hurts why am I even trying to write in this thing when I can't sit down?

Okay. That's better. I've got a cloud to sit on now. (_Not_ cotton candy. Why why why do I pull out the damn cotton candy every time I face this bozo? I like cotton candy fine, but I _despise_ repeating myself. This is a cloud of sunshine, and yes, I know, I'm hurt and my magic is drastically depleted and it's a lot more effort to make a cloud out of a substance inimical to cloud, like sun, but I need this. I need a reminder that when his power isn't working on me, I'm still creative, I've still got my imagination and my sense of style.) I've lost a lot of blood and a major limb, but it's growing back. But oh dear how _slow_ it is. Yes, I know, cry you a river, when you lose a major limb yours don't regenerate at all, but you know, it's not like I haven't paid for my power. It's not like I didn't struggle to learn to control what cannot be controlled, it's not like I haven't spent most of my life being rejected by ponies for it, it's not like I didn't spend a thousand years in _stone_-

No. Calm. I have to stay calm. Which is usually the antithesis of what I'm going for but I've never liked letting rage or panic take over, and for some reason with two thirds of my tail missing and the pain that just won't go away, I'm not feeling the giddy humor thing right now. Oh sweet chaos I want to make him pay for this. It hurts, you cannot imagine how much this hurts. You have a tail but it's mostly a small bone with a lump of long stringy hair hanging from it. My tail's part of my body, as much as or even more than my legs. Or it was until some ass of a human took a whack at it with a sword. Words cannot describe how badly I want vengeance for this.

Which is the last thing I can afford to let myself want. If I come back gunning for revenge I'll play right into his hands. (I like that word, hands! Means a paw with extended digits and an opposable thumb, like mine. Hands hands hands. I'm writing this with my hands! Hahaha, ponies, you have hooves and your pets have paws but _I_ have hands! Rather griffony ones, but hands nonetheless. Dear me I think I'm going into shock. I don't even want to think about how much blood I saw all over the ground.)

I've just conjured myself a plate of nice, rare dead cow meat to eat. What? It didn't come from a real cow! I conjured it! Don't give me that look, I'm an omnivore. I don't eat meat often because, well, because I don't! I don't need to bare my soul to you just because I'm writing a journal of my encounters with the damned Seventh Element of Harmony that doesn't exist. I have reasons and I don't feel like sharing them with you. The point is, no, I do not actually eat real cows, because dead cows in your mouth cannot dance the polka. This meat never actually belonged to a cow any more than the cotton candy clouds ever belonged to a cotton. I just need red meat to replenish myself right now because that is what omnivores do when approximately a third of the blood in their body ends up all over the grass and not in their bodies anymore.

I should probably not write when I'm loopy from blood loss. I'm not actually nearly as funny this way as I am when I'm in full command of myself.

I'm going to eat this and then I'm going to get some sleep and hopefully by the time I wake up most of the tail will have regrown and then I'll tell you ponies all about my big fight and how I ended up sadly separated from my tail.

* * *

><p>THIS HURTS THIS REALLY HURTS I CANNOT GET ANY SLEEP BECAUSE I AM MISSING A TAIL I'VE TRIED HITTING MYSELF IN THE HEAD WITH ROCKS BUT THEY DIDN'T KNOCK ME UNCONSCIOUS I WANT HIM DEAD I WANT HIM DEAD I HAVE NEVER ACTUALLY WANTED TO KILL A LIVING CREATURE BEFORE I WANT TO HUMILIATE HIM AND BREAK HIS MIND AND THEN I WANT HIM DEAD WHAT IS HE DOING TO ME<p>

I CAN'T BE LIKE THIS

I CAN'T KEEP WRITING IN ALL CAPS MY HAND IS STARTING TO HURT

BUT NOT AS BAD AS MY TAIL OW OW OW

WHY WON'T THIS STUPID THING GROW BACK! GROW BACK, TAIL! COME ON, PLEASE?

Just so you know, those wrinkly spots on the paper are _not_ tears because I am _not_ crying from how much this hurts. They are lemonade. I dropped my lemonade. I was fortunate that only a few drops of it got on my journal.

My head hurts. Wonderful. He's got me top and bottom. The head's probably dehydration and stress. I... may actually have to switch from lemonade to boring old _water_. Or drink a mug of conjured blood. (I do have the fang for it.)

I don't think a pony can lose as big a chunk from their body as I just have and live through it even if they're an alicorn. That was supposed to be a reassurring thought, but for some reason it's making me feel even worse.

I'm going to die. I can't do this. I lose so much of my intelligence and my creativity and my savoir faire when I'm facing him. He's going to trick me with some mindlessly obvious trick that a foal could see through, and I won't see through it because he won't let me, he'll fog my mind and make me an idiot and I'll fall for it and then he'll cut me to pieces with that damn sword and I'll die. I don't see how this ends any other way.

I've got to get the sword away from him.

I've got to stop confronting him directly. He wants me to be the villain? Fine, right now I want to be as villainous as I can be all over his flank, but there's no reason I have to be so blunt about it. Work from the shadows, do just enough to make him think I'm plotting and planning and he's going to get his big showdown eventually. Do some things that look really evil but aren't. I'll relocate some Ponyville ponies to the lost Crystal Empire where they won't be showing up for a couple of months, given that that enchantment's about to snap, and I'll leave in their place stuffed plushies of them, and Mr. Seventh Element of gaaahhh, _Protection_, oh it hurts my brain to even write that, will think I turned them into plushies. That evil enough for you, monkey boy?

My tail hurts _so much_. Do you know what kind of nerves are down there? Some of that region's an _erogenous zone_ and he just chopped it off. Oh, my masculinity's still quite intact but the underside of my tail can be _very_ sensitive under the right conditions except not any more until it grows back because he _cut it off._

Well, except for the part that I cut off. Because the stump was glowing, and it burned, and the glow was crawling up my tail, and the piece he'd cut off was glowing and disappearing in a rain of firefly sparks and I was afraid all of me would suffer the same fate, and I tried to throw my magic at it but it was harmony magic, I couldn't make it budge and it was eating its way up my tail, so I amputated a chunk of it myself, with a perfectly chaos-compatible sword I conjured before I had time to have second thoughts about mutilating myself. Now the stump isn't glowing anymore, and I've successfully managed to get it to start growing back, but the _pain_. Oh chaos the pain.

How I wish I dared to get drunk.

Well. At least this just hurts like a tail that got cut in half and not like Harmony's slowly burning me alive from the tail upward. Focus on the positive, that's what I always say!

I need to get some sleep. I don't know how that's going to happen when my tail hurts so much and I don't dare take anything that might possibly impair my thinking or my judgement and my magic is so weak right now, but it has to happen because I cant fight him without a clear head. He'll take me apart. Literally.

* * *

><p>Well, ponies, you'll all be thrilled to know that I did finally get some sleep last night (or possibly night before last, because I feel as if I might have slept an entire day), and that about half my tail has grown back, and it doesn't hurt anymore. It itches horribly, but at least the pain is mostly gone. So I have a clearer head now. And as I have reviewed this journal, I've realized what a terrible oversight I've made. I started writing this thing because I wanted ponies to know what my opponent is really, but I've never actually explained that! Dear me, it's a good thing I survived this encounter, because that would have been deeply embarrassing.<p>

So let me tell you about how all this began, how I first encountered my enemy, what he is, and then maybe I'll get around to telling you what happened yesterday.

* * *

><p>Over ten years ago, maybe as many as fifteen (I may have mentioned not being all that good at math, or telling time, especially when I'm stuck as a statue and can't see daylight), I felt a sudden surge of chaos right near me, so close I could almost touch it, and I felt the bonds that held me starting to snap. Not because of the chaos energy, but because the Elements of Harmony, frozen in stasis for so long, were waking up, and all they had done before they went to sleep was beginning to reset itself. I observed a little filly who'd caused that surge, powerful enough to hatch a dragon egg and force-grow the infant to nearly full size, Celestia's personal protégé, and I knew, that would be the next Element of Magic. And as I followed the threads of "destiny" (a concept I don't believe in, precisely, but there <em>is<em> an operating force on ponies that at least somewhat resembles destiny), I found another filly, a pegasus, who'd triggered that surge in the unicorn, somehow. And _she_ was connected to others as well. It took a long time, but what else did I have to do? Being a stone statue doesn't really fill one's social calendar much. I traced the paths of destiny out from that pegasus and found her connected to a total of five fillies, including the one with such powerful, chaotic magic within her. Now, I complain frequently that math is unutterably tedious for me and I can't often be bothered with it, but I _can_ count to six. I knew who my opponents would be, when my prison finally weakened enough that I could break free.

A garden is a peaceful, boring place... not much in the way of chaos there, sadly. Disharmony was easier to come by. I'd push as much of my power out through the bonds that held me as I could to make ponies irritable around me, usually whenever I could find a large group of them. And apparently, Canterlot Gardens was the must-see place to go for foal field trips, and it's _incredibly_ easy to make foals turn on each other. It doesn't last - foals are very volatile - but I didn't need lasting disharmony, I just needed quick, powerful bursts, preferably accompanied by some chaos, and one thing foals are good at is chaos. Little by little I built up a reserve of power, waiting for the day when the bonds would be weak enough that I could break them.

When I wasn't gathering my energy, I observed my opponents. It was terribly difficult, because being in stone meant that I couldn't see, and while for some reason I could hear, it's apparently not the done thing to go to the Canterlot Sculpture Gardens to gossip about fillies from Cloudsdale and Ponyville. But I could walk in dreams - I had to be more circumspect about it after Loonie came back, but I can do it in the daytime, and ponies take naps. So I studied my opponents, learning their strengths and weaknesses, preparing a means of destroying the harmony within them and between them so utterly that no one would be able to stand against me.

And then I finally did it. I broke free. I attacked them, turning their strengths to weaknesses, turning them against themselves and against each other. I filled the world with glorious Chaos. And within about a day or so, I was in stone again. About the only possible upside to this was that the new bearers were mortal, and once one of them died there'd be a gap as the others adjusted to carrying the load, and possibly an even longer gap after they all died, so I was looking at 120 years, tops, not another millennium. But I'll admit it, I was... well, after having to wait so long after I'd already waited so long, and after I'd tasted freedom and had it snatched from me so quickly, to say I was "very unhappy" with the situation was a dire understatement.

So when my bonds broke prematurely, when I felt Harmony itself shift and twist radically under me and a massive displacement wave of transformed information hit the world's mana pool and charge my batteries, I didn't waste any time questioning it. I broke loose and promptly held a party for myself... in Zebrica. Hadn't been there in a while, and one notable thing about Zebrica, it is _halfway around the world_ from the Elements of Harmony. Oh, you can get so much mileage out of varying patterns! Ponies get mildly annoyed if you change their colors, but if you change a zebra's color and alter the pattern of their stripes, you've just tipped over the bedrock of their whole world! Hilarity, I tell you. I had to dodge a few shamans, because a really good zebra shaman can be as dangerous as an alicorn in the right context, but it's astonishingly easy to tell a shaman from another zebra; listen for the rhyming. And if they speak at a normal speed, don't stammer, and don't miss their rhymes, then they're an experienced shaman, which meant they were getting a no-expenses-paid tour of Minos before they could pull anything out of their saddlebags and throw it at me. I might possibly also have put a few on the gambling floor of a casino in Las Pegasus. What? Ponies are generous; I'm _sure_ one of the casino staff unicorns would have been happy to cast a cloud-walking spell on a suddenly appearing zebra so they could safely leave the casino. Most zebras have large gold earrings, so I'm sure they found something to pay for their transportation down to the ground with.

But, of course, home is where the heart is, and I love my little ponies far too much to abandon them for zebras forever. Zebras don't scream and run around in circles _nearly_ as adorably as ponies do. And zebras are remarkably difficult to drive insane. I suppose when you don't have the magic to micromanage every little bit of nature around you, and you also have to live amongst lions as a regular thing rather than encountering manticores only on trips to exotically chaotic forests, you learn to roll with the punches. It's sometimes fun to watch them grimly trying to play parkour with chaos, desperately trying to route around obstacles and keep going on with their day, and if you discord a zebra they lose their stripes, which is funny to look at, but it does make it remarkably obvious what you've done. The idea behind making calm ponies little raging balls of fury and cowardly ponies put up their dukes is to confuse and upset the ponies around them who don't realize what's going on, thus spreading disharmony. When everyzebra can look at your target and simply ignore every last thing the poor zebra has to say because they understand that she's not feeling like herself at the moment, it lacks that certain wildfire flair that making ponies disharmonious can trigger. It's as if someone keeps moving some of your standing dominoes before the ones you tipped over get there, thus causing your lovely domino falling wave to stop short.

So I came back home once I felt that I was fully rested, recharged and ready to go. And as soon as I was back within the borders of Equestria, I had a _glorious_ idea. An amazing, wonderful, hilarious idea, one they'd never see coming.

I was going to do the exact same thing that I did the last time!

In retrospect... if I'd been in the habit of thinking about what I was thinking, maybe I'd have seen what was going wrong then. But it hardly matters. It might be better this way; if I'd recognized what he was doing before I'd understood how powerful he was, I might have made the mistake of trying to challenge him directly on that level. I don't think that would have ended well for me.

Still, have you any idea how humiliating it is to remember having the idea "do exactly what you did the last time with only minor changes" and remember it seeming fresh and original and deliciously unexpected? To be the _Lord of Chaos_, harbinger of change, spirit of disharmony, and be so unbearably dull and unimaginative as to repeat oneself, and think it would be exciting and fun? I could forgive myself for it if I'd been thinking of it as wittily ironic, perhaps a critique of the predictability of perpetual unpredictability, but no, I wasn't nearly sharp enough to think of that.

I stole the Elements of Harmony. (The spell protecting them was better this time; it had both Celestia and Luna's signatures on it, and Luna is _good_ at traps. But when I decide to be patient and careful, I can be very, very good at disarming bombs. Stop laughing, that wasn't a joke. I actually can be patient and careful when I want to be; my problem's more with the fact that that is enormously boring, so I have to want something a _lot_ to bother being patient or careful.) I stashed them at the Castle of the Two Sisters, hanging them back up in exactly the place they'd been when my dear, sweet nemeses found them in the first place, because "back where you began" could refer to the library where they first learned about the Elements or it could refer to the place where they first found them. (Or I could have hidden them in Celestia's castle, but that's a trifle too close.) Then I poured a big bucket of chaos all over Canterlot so that Celestia would summon the Element Bearers. (I'm lying. It was cotton candy with chocolate milk. See my frustrations up above, near where I was ranting about my tail. Or don't, because I'd kind of prefer you never read that again.)

Luna was asleep, of course, same as the last time. The last time I'd just bespelled her to stay asleep. This time I decided to have a bit of fun with her. I appeared to her in her own dreams - where of course she's quite powerful, a dreamwalker on home turf is nothing to sneeze at, but I'm familiar with all her tricks - and when she tried to wake herself up so she could alert her sister that I was back, _then_ she discovered I'd bespelled her to stay asleep. So she came after me, and oh, was she ever ferocious. Pulled out all the stops. Even sent her alter ego against me, as a separate entity. It was _loads_ of fun. Especially the part where I lured them into a lower dream level, disguising what I was doing with so much pyrotechnics, chaos, and innuendo-laden taunts at the two of them that they had no opportunity to notice how far down they were, and then spun them a completely normal, realistic, reality dream and let them wake themselves up into it. Well, let Luna wake herself up, I had no idea where Moonie went after Woona went for my bait.

See, Luna is the Princess of Dreams, and generally speaking more powerful than I am in a dreamworld, but I've spent a thousand years _living_ in dreams I've been constructing for myself. I am much, much better than Luna at inventing a dream that feels real, because while she was able to walk all over the moon and gaze down at the world below, I had _nothing _but the dreams I made for myself. Now you may ask me, "But, Discord, you turn the real world into a surreal dream landscape every chance you get, why would you bother to learn how to create a realistic, orderly dream landscape?" And the answer is, if you walk in the door and there's already chaos, that's fun to watch, but it's purely a spectator sport. I am an _artiste._ I enjoy looking at the paintings of others, but what I truly love is to paint my own. So it is much, much more fun for me to corrupt an orderly, normal-looking world and turn it into chaos than to live in a world that's already chaos. I made reality after reality after realistic reality so I could at least pretend I was actually alive and moving around when I unleashed my havoc onto them.

It never really fooled me unless I was actually asleep, but I got it to the point where the only reason I knew it wasn't real was that I knew I'd invented it, and knowing that, I could feel the hollowness in it. Luna would be trapped in my dream for quite some time, believing she was undergoing normal, boring life as usual. Well, as boring as life gets when there's an imaginary _moi_ running around, but Luna wanted to believe the Bearers would quickly solve my riddle and win the day, so that's what I gave her and she fell for it.

Then I put her in a diaper, an adorable little bonnet, and the most precious little baby nightgown, alicorn sized, and put her in a rocking cradle. Celestia met with the Bearers outside her inner sanctum, and led them in to have her discussion with them - which was also astonishingly repetitive - and went to open the new, improved lock for the Elements. And found me inside, dressed as a nanny, rocking the cradle with Luna in it. "Shh!" I said. "Don't wake the baby!"

Well what do you know but Celestia gave out an ear-splitting screech, right after I'd warned her to be quiet, too. "_Discord!_ What have you done with _my sister?_"

"As if I'd do anything to sweet wittwe Woona!" I said. "Look how adorable she is, sleeping peacefully... you know, they're so much sweeter like this than when they're awake and screaming at you. Ever wish they could just stay sleeping forever?"

In the general chorus of dismay, I heard a masculine voice, to my surprise. "_Luna!_ You evil bastard, if you've done anything to harm her-!"

"Why does everypony think I'd hurt Luna?" I complained, teleporting out of the Elements' sanctum and into the main hall, as I sent Luna's cradle to her old bedroom in the old castle. "I would never harm that sweet little face! But you might, if you make the wrong decisions."

There was a newcomer to the group, I noticed, now that I was directly facing off against them. A male human. I confess I was quite surprised; it'd been a long, long time since I'd seen one of those, and he'd have to be a worldwalker, or have fallen through a portal, to have ended up here. Immediately I decided to link the enchantment on Luna to the male human kissing her. That joke was so obvious, it was _screaming_ at me to be done. "This is new!" I said cheerfully, twining myself around the human. "Tia, where'd you pick this one up? Magicless Bipeds R Us? Quills and Couch Potatoes? Or is he your mail order husband?"

"He belongs to all of us!" Rarity snapped. "And if you value your life, Discord, you'll keep your paws _off_ him!"

"Oh my! Is Generosity getting greedy again? He doesn't look like such a prize. Though I'll admit he might be an improvement over Tom."

The human glared me in the face. "Back off, Discord," he snarled, and for a moment, I was afraid. Of a human.

Let me back up a bit here and explain why this is ridiculous even by my standards.

Your average mare is about three and a half heads tall, maybe four. Your average stallion is between four and five heads. Celestia towers over most of her little ponies at six and a half heads tall. This is the height of a tall human. Humans are bipeds, so of course if Celestia rears she's a lot bigger than the human, and a normal pony rearing would be within a normal range for human height. Now, my height varies depending on how big I feel like being this minute, but if I'm not doing anything to modify it, I'm ten heads tall bipedal and about seven quad. (Counting down from my head, of course. A lot of that's in my neck.)

Humans do not have hard, strong hooves like my goat hoof. They do not have semi-flexible, powerful hooves like ponies do. They don't have hooves at all. Their hands are like mine, dextrous, attached to arms that aren't very strong in comparison to their legs, delicate and relatively weak but very, very, _very_ useful. However, theirs don't end in claws; they end in thin keratin plates that stick out the end like someone was _trying_ to design them with claws and just couldn't draw. These are sharp enough to do a little bit of blunt-cut damage to human skin, which has _no_ protection on it, neither fur, feathers nor scales, but against a creature with any protection whatsoever they aren't much. Their legs are stronger than their arms, but no match for a pony's, and their feet are shaped roughly like my dragon foot, with a lot less dexterity, less balance, and no claws. They don't have a tail at all. They don't have wings. And they don't have any magic.

This wasn't always true; their world had magic once, but something happened to it. I have no idea what, because I don't care. On the human homeworld nothing is sapient but themselves and some sea creatures, so they got to the top of the food chain by being smarter than everything else. They're not, however, smarter than ponies (not stupider, but not smarter), and they are most assuredly not smarter than _moi._ And they have _no_ physical advantages over me whatsoever. They are shorter, they are weaker, they have no tail, they can't fly, no skin protection anywhere, their hands are as good as mine but have no claws on them, neither their legs nor their feet are as strong as mine, and while they are omnivores they have a lot fewer meat-eater teeth than I do. They have some advantages over ponies, hands and height, although ponies have magic so I think humans do worse on that deal as well. They're much more aggressive than ponies, but that just makes them more fun to taunt than they'd otherwise be, considering how weak they are.

So the thought that I would be scared of a human for even the tiniest of moments, that I would back away because an omnivore predator who is substantially less impressive in the predator department than I am glared at me... it's ludicrous. And yet it happened. I backed off.

But I covered for it, chuckling. "Feisty, aren't you!" I said.

"What have you done with Luna?" he growled at me.

"I just put her to bed, of course. She needs her sleep! Stays up all night, every night, poor dear."

He lunged at me, grabbed my beard and dragged my face down to the level of his. "Give her back!"

"Of course, of course. Just as soon as you ponies solve my riddle." I grinned at him. "And you, though I suppose you're not a pony at all, are you?"

"He's a human!" Pinkie Pie said.

"He's our human, so hands off!" Applejack snarled.

"Tell him that. He's the one grabbing _me_." I teleported out of his grasp and up into the air. "Ready to take notes, mes amis?"

Twilight actually pulled out a notebook and started doing exactly that as I recited. "A weighty choice is yours to make, if a sleeping princess you would wake. Follow the path of twists and turns, if the Elements' place you seek to learn. Once you've returned back to the start, then wake the princess with your heart. Or seek her out without a guide, if you believe my words are lies, and trust your power and your pride that _you_ can cause the moon to rise."

And then I delivered a garden variety maniacal laugh and left them there.

Predictably, they had an argument over whether they could trust me or not, since I'd just basically thrown down a gauntlet and said "play my game, or assume you can beat me without playing." The human was all in favor of assuming my words were lies and going and looking for Luna directly, and Rainbow Dash agreed with him, but Celestia pleaded with him to reconsider, saying that as great as his power was, it was no match for mine, not without the other elements, and that if he arrogantly assumed he could easily beat me, he might be throwing Luna's life away. This seemed a little odd to me - Celestia really should have known I don't kill ponies and I wasn't going to start with Luna - but it worked; the human decided that I was so childish, if he refused to play my game I would kill Luna out of spite, and that was the meaning of the riddle.

In retrospect this is bitterly laughable, that he'd call _me_ childish. But I didn't yet know what he was, or what he was doing.

* * *

><p>Whew! Writing is exhausting work! How does that little dragon stand doing it all the time?<p>

Now if you'll pardon me, I need to go do something subtle, yet so blatantly obvious that my idiotic enemy will pick up on it, so he knows I haven't forgotten I'm the villain here. I do declare, when am I going to find time to actually fight him for real if I keep having to go have pointless confrontations?

I have no idea what I'm going to actually _do_, but I find my most creative ideas usually happen that way. All I know about what I'm going to do is this:

It has to at least look villainous.

It has to not violate any of my personal codes of conduct, such as "don't turn ponies into stone" and "don't be a complete uncreative putz".

It has to stay _well away_ from the Element of Protection And Also Rewriting The Laws of Magic And Also Swinging Really Nasty Swords.

It has to not bore me completely.

It has to have no chance whatsoever of me ending up in stone or dead before I'm done with it. So if I'm going to go play a game with somepony, it's going to have to be completely unfair. Le sigh. Well, I'm not doing this for entertainment primarily... though if I do things that don't entertain me, I risk losing myself, since "everything I do has to be amusing" has been one of my core values for millennia.

Terribly sorry to leave you all on the edges of your seats like this, but needs must when the devil dances, or so they say. I'm off to be a bad guy for a bit! Don't worry, I'll finish telling you all about Tall, Bland and Homicidal when I get back.

Or I won't. In which case you probably already know who he is. And it's probably too late anyway.

Arrivederci!


	3. Let Me Count the Stupidities

I have returned! No worse for wear, this time, thankfully. Everything in perfect working order, including my tail and my level of intelligence (I think... though I suppose that if I'd been turned remarkably dense again, how would I know?) I'm sitting back with a glass of lime spaghetti and a plate of bean soda, relaxing after a hard day of being evil. Actually most of what I did today wasn't particularly evil, though I suspect the Seventh Element of Stupidity thinks I'm being evil at every moment of every day with every single thing I do, including my trips to the toilet. (To be fair, most ponies who have to come in to use a toilet after I've just been would agree with him about the evilness of my bathroom breaks, but I digress.)

I spent most of my day resetting the Panauricon, planting listening spells all over Ponyville, and a few crystal eyes. (I don't use real eyes anymore ever since Luna found one and stepped on it back in the day. That was over a thousand years ago and I can _still_ remember the extreme levels of ow that produced.) Then I went searching for potential allies by attempting to identify ponies, or other beings, who might have had negative interactions with the Bearers and their families. Found two con artists, an arrogant showmare, a griffin distinguishable from the others only by the fact that she ever voluntarily spent time around ponies and not by her extraordinarily low opinion of them since that's standard griffin issue, a noble stallion adopted by Celestia as a nephew, and two bratty little fillies. There are probably some others, but this is a good start.

I'm thinking about pulling out the old Elements of Disharmony. Given the Seventh Element's keen intellectual capacity, he's likely to see that as a genuine Evil Plan and not as what it would be, a deliciously chaotic distraction. Celestia could tell him how useless the Elements of Disharmony actually are, but I'll bet she won't, because she _defers_ to him. My splendid orderly nemesis, my beautiful enemy, my proud and powerful Princess of the Sun, glorious and devastating and oh so cruel in her kindness... and she lets a human barely out of childhood tell her what to think. Oh, Celestia. I'd cry for you and what he's done to you, if you hadn't emptied me of tears for you, or anypony, millennia ago. The thing about the Elements of Disharmony that every pony who's faced them, and more than a few chaos avatars who've tried to use them, forgets is that _disharmony can't work together._ So you put together your Evil League of Evil to take up the Elements of Disharmony and oppose the Elements of Harmony, gather them all together, and they immediately start bickering with each other. And they won't stop long enough to actually fight the Elements of Harmony. One on one, if you wind one up and send her off against her corresponding Element, she might actually win, because individual Elements of Harmony are weaker without their partners, and individual Elements of Disharmony are strongest when alone. But put them all together and they'll fight with each other more than they'll fight the Harmony Elements.

So as a part of a carefully planned and coordinated attack on the Elements, in a group, they are worse than useless; you'd be better off hiring mercenaries. But as part of a wonderfully chaotic show of fire and motion, a bit of the old razzle dazzle to misdirect your opponents and make them think you're actually enacting an Evil Plan when in fact you're sitting back with popcorn and chaos-tan lotion ready to soak in some disharmonious rays, get a few laughs, and cover up what you're _actually_ doing, they're marvelous. The only problem is, I forget where I put them. What? Spend a thousand years in stone and see if _you_ remember where you left your keys! I'm sure it'll come back to me.

Anyway. Reset the Panauricon, identify some potential bearers for the Elements of Disharmony, and also, I stole a foal's ice cream, just to make it clear that I'm playing the villain role like I'm supposed to. Maybe that was a bit much, but honestly, this guy is so incredibly dumb, I'm afraid that if I just work in the background on some Evil Plan or other, he'll get frustrated with the inactivity and force me to show myself so he can humiliate me and cut me up again. I'm _really_ not looking forward to facing him directly, though sooner or later I suspect he'll make me. If I can put off that day by stealing a foal's ice cream, then by all means, the ice cream shall be mine! Though really it was quite boring. Strawberry flavored, euw. Not even strawberry banana or strawberry with sprinkles. I had to load it up with potato chips and salsa to make it flavorful enough for my palate.

Then I came back here, to continue the sad, sordid tale of my encounters with The Most Uninteresting Man In Equestria.

...You know I really don't want to do this. The part I need to write about next is so unendurably humiliating, I am sorely tempted to just stop writing this thing. I mean, honestly, is there a point? If I win, I'll destroy this journal and all these words will go to waste; if I lose, who's going to read this, really? And what good would it do them if they did? I sorely doubt some mere unimportant pony leading a perfectly ordinary life is going to be able to destroy a creature who warps reality to make himself come up roses every time, and all the _important_ ponies are already under the spell. Who could even make use of this journal if I'm defeated?

Well, if I die... there'll be a chaos avatar after me, and Human McHumanson won't know of his or her existence. This document might be of use to whoever that is, assuming they know how to read (this is not always a given with chaos avatars.) And while Princess Pink Lovey and her hubby think my nemesis is the greatest thing since sliced bread after he annihilated the Changelings and saved them both, they aren't under his control to nearly the same extent as the Bearers and the older princesses. And if I didn't mistake what I saw - and when it comes to disharmony I rarely do - Twilight's pet dragon is rather miserable with this whole situation. He's under the spell as much as any of the others, compelled to practically worship the Seventh Element... who is ignoring his existence, as nearly as I can tell. And apparently Prince Blueface or whatever his name is quite despises the Bearers' new pal; I was shocked at first, and hopeful that perhaps somepony else could resist, but no, Bluecrab is also a designated villain, like I am, and that's why He Who Shall Be Loved is allowing Blueballs to hate him. Still, that's a potential ally for me, one with the actual power to do something... not something that will _help_, of course, because Bluebeard doesn't have anywhere near the kind of power he'd need to fight this guy, but again, fire and motion, and possibly somepony who could make use of this journal if I'm defeated.

So I suppose there's no help for it. I have to write this damn thing, as accurately as I can remember. How boring! But ... I really wish you could hear my dramatic sigh here, it's one of my better ones... this isn't a fight I chose. There's no guarantee it'll entertain me, and if it stops being fun I still have to fight. I _hate_ this. But I don't have a choice.

Onward, then, to the tale of my first humiliation at this creature's hands.

* * *

><p>The first time I lured the Bearers into the hedge maze, I was fairly sure they wouldn't be able to resist my power, not for the most part anyway. There had always been a few, but generally they'd been forewarned; nopony had encountered my power in a thousand years, and Celestia had done a terrible job of preparing these six for my capabilities. I thought perhaps <em>one<em> might resist (though I was wrong about which one; I'd expected Pinkie Pie might possibly have greater resistance than she had, considering the connection between Laughter and Chaos - oh, Harmony, you may try to claim it for your own, but Laughter is really _mine_ and we both know it - and I never expected the little yellow pegasus who shrieked in fear at my _picture_ would be the one who I'd need to use direct magic inversion on.) But I assumed, correctly, that most of them would fall fairly easily.

You see, the trick is that you get them to open the door by being friendly. Concerned. Helpful. Shakespony might have said "one can smile, and smile, and still be a villain", but most ponies can't comprehend this; intellectually they know I'm their enemy, but when I speak to them soothingly and I commiserate with them on the greatest anguish they hadn't known they had, it confuses them, and part of their mind takes what I have to say as friendly advice. It's hardly their fault, poor things; they're herd animals. They're so dependent on _harmony_ and the opinions of others, they can't resist a smiling villain. And just as telling a pony not to think of a swordfish causes them to do so, telling a pony about the fears they didn't know they had makes those fears come to life in their mind, and they'll do anything to block them out, including letting my influence in. I _can_ straight-up brainwash a pony, but that's cheating; it's so, so much better when I get them to open the door themselves than when I break it down.

But most ponies can resist me if I go after them a second time using the same attack. So when I'm in my right mind, I'd _never_ try to discord the same pony the same way twice. It's not like I'd ever have to, either. Before ponies named my patented mind-alteration technique after me, I called it unbalancing; it's the process of altering the balance of emotional traits within a pony's mind. I can make a pony so gullible that they'll believe the sky has always been green, or so paranoid that they're convinced all their friends and family are impostors. I can take essentially any trait that exists within them, and either increase or decrease it. I don't _have_ to make it be the personality trait they're best known for... though it's easiest, and oftentimes most fun, to do it that way, and against the Elements of Harmony I thought doing it that way would maximize their inability to harmonize with their own elements. But against these neurotic mares there were any number of angles of attack. They appeared to have a bizarre attachment to this human; if I amplified that to a ridiculous degree I could make them insanely jealous of each other, and tear him apart (possibly literally, but more likely just emotionally) in their conflicts with each other. I could make them so calm and relaxed, they wouldn't have any energy to fight me. I could amplify their Elemental traits ludicrously, so Applejack really would tear their friendship apart being brutally honest and Rarity would drive herself to a sickbed giving her time and energy away and Fluttershy would be incapable of hurting _me_ as much as she would be incapable of hurting anyone else. There were any number of things I could have done!

So this time, of course, I presented each of them with the exact same temptations I'd offered last time. The temptations that they would almost certainly be able to resist, having encountered them before. And they resisted me, of course, because these were the exact same temptations. So I discorded them by pure magical force, the way I had to do to Fluttershy the first time around.

No, really. I cheated. Just like that. I invited them to play a game, and then I just used brute force on them anyway. If I was going to do that why didn't I send them to the moon? Why didn't I hide the Elements in Tartarus? This wasn't any kind of game at all! I'm all right with playing a game that's rigged in my favor - honestly aren't they all? - but to not even _try_ to play within the rules I'd set for myself... where's the fun in that? Where's the challenge?

And yet none of this occurred to me until it was over.

I had just finished convincing Rainbow Dash, again, that Cloudsdale would plummet like the House of Usher without her awesome and personal attention to saving it, again, when the human staggered into the clearing we were in, gasping.

"Rainbow! Rainbow Dash! You have to come with me! The others- they need our help! They've been discorded!"

I'd shrunk back into the shadows to watch the interaction. I wasn't disappointed. Rainbow Dash said, "Help 'em yourself, dweeb - I've got things I gotta do."

"No!" He grabbed her wing before she could take off. "You can't leave! Don't you remember Discord's stupid rule? If anyone uses their wings or their magic, he wins!"

(I didn't actually take their wings or horns this time. I just told them that if they used them, they'd forfeit the game, and Luna and the Elements would remain in my custody. And I thought I was being creative! Mixing things up! Oh, the humiliation.)

"Yeah, well, just because _you_ don't have any of your kind here in Equestria, the same isn't true for me, Anon," Rainbow Dash said. "I've got a whole city of pegasi to save, and they're my kind! Not like you! So that's where my loyalties are. See ya!"

As she took off and he broke down in an anguished scream, I could only think, _His name is Anon? His name is __Anon?__Really?_

I couldn't control myself. I broke down laughing.

Anon - no, seriously, that was what she called him - turned on me. "What have you done to Rainbow Dash?" he shouted at me. "You corrupted her, didn't you? Just like you corrupted all of them!"

I got control of myself back enough to talk. What I _meant_ to say was "Your name is really Anon? Seriously?" Instead what I found myself saying was "You should see the look on your face! Priceless!"

For a moment I was confused. I remembered enough to know that that hadn't been what I meant to say, but I completely lost track of what I _had_ meant to say, or in fact what I'd just been laughing about. Before I could spend any time thinking about it, though, he grabbed me by the neck - which actually hurt. I've been grabbed by the neck quite a lot in my life. It doesn't usually hurt. Generally, in fact, very little can hurt me. "Fix it, Discord!" he snarled at me. "Put them back the way they were!"

"Or what?" I pulled myself free of him, snickering. "You'll posture heroically some more?"

"No," he said. "They're _my_ friends, and they're under my protection. For I am the Seventh Element of Harmony, _Protection_, and I will defeat you!"

I gaped at him. Even in my impaired state, I knew what he'd just said was total nonsense, and not the fun kind, either. "There _is_ no Seventh Element of Harmony!"

"None that you knew of, villain," he said. "It could only be activated by the touch of a human, and I'm the first one to enter Equestria in thousands of years! Longer than even you have existed!"

I pride myself on my ability to say things to my opponents that make them splutter, unable to figure out what part of my statement they want to refute first and tangling up their tongue with indecision and rage. I could say with equal pride, before that day, that no one had ever been able to do it to _me._ I suppose I can still say no one has ever been able to do it to me on purpose, the way I do it to others; this bozo actually believed every incredibly dumb thing he'd just said. I spluttered, completely unable to think of which stupid part of his several-layer-cake of stupidity I wanted to smash first.

While I was spluttering, he took a white gem out from under his shirt, a pendant on a chain. The top of the pendant was shaped vaguely like a golden hilt, with the chain running through it, and the shape of the gem, with the hilt-like fixture it was set in, made it look rather like a small sword. He held it tightly in both hands, and it glowed, shining through the skin and making his hands look blood red.

I backed away. I could feel Harmony magic radiating from it, but Harmony magic that seemed twisted and wrong somehow... not that I'm an expert on Harmony, but this felt... predatory. Unpleasantly like the feeling behind Order's power, actually - the sense that the power wanted to crush anything that opposed it, rather than what I usually felt from Harmony, which was the desire to force you to agree. Violence, rather than mind control. But this wasn't Order; there was too much chaos in it, too much passion. It was Harmony, but the _wrong_ Harmony.

The first time I saw the Tree of Harmony, it scared the pants off me, or would have if I'd been wearing pants at the time. But then, I'd been a child. I've faced and fought that damned Tree and its offshoots and partners many times. I knew it too well to be afraid of it any longer. Concerned, yes; wary, certainly; but _afraid?_ No.

This, I was afraid of. This was Harmony gone very, very wrong.

A suit of light armor materialized around him - mail shirt and skirt, gauntlets, and a helmet that was hardly more than a hat - all white and glowing faintly. The gem transformed in his hands into a sword, and he swung it to point straight into the air. "Discord! With the power of Protection, and to save my friends, I will destroy you!"

I shrieked like a little filly and teleported.

I didn't go far, just to the other side of the hedge. But then I heard him screaming. "Coward! Run all you want, Discord! I'll find the other Elements, and Princess Luna, and then I'll destroy you!"

I am not normally in the habit of being terrified of anything just because I don't understand how it's possible. After all, I'm the Lord of the Impossible; if someone else manages to pull off something _I_ don't understand, well, that's my game and I'm not going to let them beat me at it. But for some reason I was completely panicked. "It can't be," I started mumbling to myself. "That power... he can't be... how can he be the Seventh Element?"

His sword came slicing through the hedge next to me. I yelped and barely dodged out of the way. "I can hear you, you monster!" the human shouted, lunging through the hole he'd just cut in the hedge. "You messed with Princess Luna, you messed with my friends, and I'm going to make you pay!"

I was half-paralyzed with terror. A thousand things I could have done to block him, counter him, escape him, and I did none of them - just stumbled backward clumsily, barely dodging the thrusts of the sword. "Look, can't we talk about this?" I said desperately. "You don't want to kill me, you'll never find out where Luna and the Elements are if you do!"

"I'm confident we'll find them! If I kill you, your spell on Princess Luna will fade, and she can help us find the Elements!"

"And what if you're wrong? What if I left Luna in a trap, so the moment she wakes up and tries to get out of bed, the whole place goes up like a nuke? You are one of those humans from a time period where you know what a nuke is, right?"

He lunged at me again, and I tripped over a fountain wall and fell into the fountain. The human jumped into the fountain and had his sword to my throat before I could get up. "Tell me you didn't, monster," he growled. "_Tell_ me you didn't bring a _nuclear bomb_ to Equestria!"

This was the first time I'd seen him react with anything that looked like fear. I smirked at him. "Well, why not?" I said. "_You're_ here, why not some other examples of humanity's finest work?"

The tip of the sword pricked my skin, and I felt a wave of disruption crash over my magic, wrecking my control. My eyes went wide. I know, I make control of chaos look easy, and I look dead sexy doing it too, but controlling chaos magic is actually very, very hard. That's why so few creatures use it, despite the fact that it's more powerful than either harmonic magic or dark magic. If you know what you're doing, harmonic magic always does what you want it to, and dark magic isn't any harder to control than harmonic magic - it just makes it harder to control _yourself_ when you use it, since the more you give in to your most negative emotions, the more powerful your dark magic becomes. But chaos magic does what _it_ wants to do. A lot of what I do is essentially the equivalent of using magic to roll dice, then taking note of the effect I got and running with it. With my power disrupted, my connection to chaos itself jangled and confused, I knew I couldn't reliably get _any_ effect I wanted - I could try telekinesis and get a bunch of flowers, I could attempt to teleport and instead turn myself inside out. I wasn't powerless, far from it, but with the incredible range of what my powers can do, being unable to control them at all meant that if I invoked my power to try to escape or fight back, I might destroy myself or aid my enemy or just end up looking really stupid. "I didn't!" I said, panicking completely. "I was joking! There aren't any nukes in Equestria!"

He didn't ease up. "Tell me where Princess Luna is, creature! Where have you hidden her?"

I looked up into his eyes and realized I was well and truly screwed. If I didn't tell him, he'd kill me. The disruption to my power meant that I couldn't reliably invoke my magic to heal or transform my way out of whatever damage he might do me - with my magic I'm nearly invulnerable, but without it, I'm flesh and blood like anything else. But if I _did_ tell him... I was afraid he'd kill me anyway. He didn't look sane. The psychotic hatred in his eyes, the fact that his sword was apparently an Element of Harmony except one perverted into a tool of destruction and war, the fact that he was human and humans are aggressive little monsters... there was bloodlust in his face, and it wasn't going to be sated by my cooperation.

As my mind was racing, trying to come up with a way out of this, I heard Twilight Sparkle's voice. "Anon, what are you doing?"

"I'm trying to get some answers out of this misshapen monster!"

I wanted to make a wiseass comment about that, but refrained, since there was still a sword poking me in the throat. "I'll tell you whatever you want to know, _if_ you back off! How do I know that you won't just kill me after I answer your questions?" I said.

"Anon would never do that!" Twilight said. "He's honorable, unlike you!"

"Then I want his word of honor that if I tell him where Princess Luna and the Elements are, he won't hurt me."

He grinned coldly at me. "I'll swear not to _kill_ you, Discord. I won't make any promises about not _hurting_ you."

I really did not like the sound of that. "Fine. Get that thing off my neck and give me your word that you won't kill me."

"And how do I know you won't run away the moment I sheathe my sword?"

I rolled my eyes. "You're still standing on top of my neck. Where did you expect me to go?"

"Release my friends from your spell and I'll sheathe my sword."

I wasn't falling for that. "Give me your word of honor that if I release your friends, you will get that sword out of my face, and that once I tell you where I hid Princess Luna and the Elements, you won't kill me."

He poked me harder. The part of my neck he was poking with the sword was directly under my chin, since the rest of my neck was underwater in the fountain, so I couldn't see, but I felt moisture and I thought I might have just started bleeding. "You don't have room to negotiate, Discord!"

"Please, just give him your word," Twilight said. "Please, Anon. You can always take it out on him later if he lies, but right now, our friends and Princess Luna are what's important!"

He growled at me, his eyes narrowing. "All right. I accept your terms."

"Go get your friends," I said. "They should all be released now." The truth was, of course, that I'd lost hold of that spell the moment he disrupted my power, so his friends were all already free.

Twilight used her magic to send up a flare, and the others gathered quickly. The last one to arrive was Rainbow Dash, who had apparently been halfway to Cloudsdale before my power wore off her.

"Anon! I am so, so sorry I was so cruel to you," Rarity sobbed. I'd say overdramatically, but if you know Rarity, you know that went without saying.

The others all had similarly hysterical sappy apologies to make to Anon (if I hadn't still been half terrorized out of my mind, I'd probably have had a much harder time not snickering at that name). He wasn't paying attention to me anymore, he'd sheathed his sword and he was entirely preoccupied with the mares hugging him and sobbing out frantic apologies.

I took a deep breath. I had enough control of my power back to safely teleport.

So I did, straight up into the air, about thirty heads above them all. Rainbow Dash could have reached me easily, except that, with my power back, I was able to attach a cuff attached to a heavy iron ball to her hind leg, so she couldn't launch. Twilight or Rarity could get that off her within a minute, but it gave me the time to do what I needed to do.

"Well, this little adventure has been delightful, but since Rainbow Crash down there used her wings, the game's been forfeit for some time. So I suppose you'll all have to find the Elements, and Luna, _without_ my help. Best of luck to you!"

"Discord!" Anon (can I actually write that without snickering now?... no, not quite) shouted up at me. "You swore you'd tell us where they are!"

"Oh no, I made _you_ swear not to kill me _if_ I told you. I never promised I actually would tell you."

"I'll kill you!"

"You'll have to catch me first," I said, and before he could pull yet another impossible magical superpower out of his large intestine, I continued with, "Ta-ta!" and vanished.

* * *

><p>Minutes after I got back here, I was reeling. Nothing that had happened today made sense. Yes, I know, I know, where's the fun in making sense, do you know how many times he's made me say that? It's like, when I'm dealing with him, all my tricks and quips from my earlier encounter with the Bearers start repeating in my head until I actually use them.<p>

The truth is, Chaos is not about nonsense and never has been. It is not about meaninglessness or true randomness. Well, okay, pure chaos is about those things, but I'm not here for pure chaos. I am not an emanation of the force of entropy (which isn't synonymous with chaos anyway), I am not a personification of an abstract concept. Chaos existed before I did and it will exist long after.

I am here because _magic_ needs chaos. And because life needs chaos, and magic has the power to crush the chaos out of life, thus crushing life and magic itself. I exist, or more precisely my role exists, to maintain a balance that allows magic and life to co-exist. And I'm outnumbered. My partners/opponents in this endless game, my opposite parties, are Order and Harmony. It's two against one, but then it might have to be. In the immortal words of Rainbow Dash, I am just that awesome.

But that means I am here for the chaos that life generates, and that life thrives on. And that is not the chaos of meaninglessness. That is the chaos of so many different meanings, a pony cannot make them all out within the cacophony. My name _means_ the sound of too many sounds, conflicting with each other, drowning each other out (as well as meaning the single note that doesn't fit, conflict, and disharmony itself.)

Everything that happens has a reason; everything that happens fits into a pattern. When there are so many reasons and so many patterns that no pony can figure them out enough to predict what will happen next with any certainty, that is chaos. Chaos isn't meaninglessness, it's _complexity._ Ponies have a hard time with this concept. One little thing goes wrong, they start declaring that the world has become total nonsense! To be brutally honest, when I first made that quip, Celestia was being an idiot, complaining that it made no sense for the Elements to be gone when she _knew_ I was loose, she _knew_ I knew they had the power to stop me, and she _knew_ I'm much more powerful than she is and an expert at breaking any sort of magical lock. It actually made so much sense for the Elements to be gone that I had been half tempted to leave paste replicas of them in there to see if Celestia would be surprised to see them still there, when I took them.

In this case, though, nothing about this made any sense because there were so many directions in which everything was wrong. To begin with, there is no Seventh Element of Harmony. I've fought Harmony long enough that I would know this, and before me, I have the knowledge of the chaos avatars before me. As far back as Chaos and Harmony have warred with each other to maintain the balance on this world, there has never been a Seventh Element. Secondly, the fundamental nature of Harmony and its greatest weakness is that all the pieces must be present; one missing piece of Harmony and there is no Harmony. So if there _had_ been a Seventh Element, none of the occasions where six elements were in use would actually have worked. Thirdly, Protection has nothing to do with Harmony! I am no expert on Harmony, as I've said, but _that_ much I know. Harmony is about working together; Protection is about working alone for the benefit of others. All of the Elements of Harmony except Magic are reciprocal; one is supposed to both give and get those traits to maintain harmony. Be honest, and get honesty from those around you. Be kind, and get kindness from those around you. Blah blah blah harmonysauce. Protection isn't reciprocal; it's extended from a protector to a protectee. Watching each others' back isn't the platonic ideal of Protection; Protection is ideally extended from the strong to the weak, and the weak do not have the power to extend it back.

And fourthly, humans have _nothing_ to do with Equestria. It makes just as much sense to say that humans can activate a particular power of Equestria as it does to say grey aliens can. Humans are an amusing race, and overrepresented in the multiverse, and I greatly enjoy them, but they are not part of our world and never were. It's certainly possible that on coming to Equestria a human could develop magic, because their world had magic once and lost it, so the capacity to do magic is probably there in the genome someplace. But to develop a power that is one of the fundamental underpinnings of the balance of magic? As Big Macintosh might say, nope.

Then there was the violence of his power, the nature of Harmony magic that could disrupt and kill. Harmony does not, normally, disrupt my magic... exactly. Harmony imposes a will on chaotic magic that turns it controlled and orderly, forcing it to conform to the will of the Harmony wielder, and when this happens, I lose control of the magic because I don't do harmonic magic. Disrupting chaos ought to be technically impossible, and certainly, disrupting chaos with harmony sounds like someone didn't read the dictionary definitions of either one.

There was something very wrong here. So I went forth to do some research.

And next time, I'll regale you all with the thrilling tale of my research, but right now I think I would rather watch paint dry. I am _so bored_. Cooped up in this cave, staying out of the way of ponies because while they're as much fun as they ever were, they have a would-be protector who wants me dead and has demonstrated rather too much potential to accomplish his goals for my taste. I have to go do something, I'm miserable in here.

I wonder if dragons are as easy to annoy as they used to be?


	4. Change The World

I don't want to do this anymore. I want to go exploring! Over a thousand years, and the world has changed completely. _Equestria's_ remained horrifically similar to what it was before I took over; they've even built a town, Ponyville, where the suburbs of Equuapolis used to be, and Canterlot, aside from making use of that mountain I built that one time, is frighteningly similar to what Equuapolis was. New Maresterdam's now Manehattan, but Fillydelphia's still Fillydelphia and Vanhoover's still Vanhoover. The Crystal Empire's in a time lock, but it'll be popping out and becoming visible to ponies within a couple of months. Quite a lot of the culture's still same-old, same-old, but what do you expect from a place that houses the only Tree of Harmony left and has immortal rulers?

The rest of the world has gotten a lot more interesting, though. I mean, I knew Albion had established a Parliament because I could feel the sweet, sweet disharmony even when I was in stone, but it's so much _fun_ to watch ordinary, democractically elected ponies getting into vicious shouting matches with hoity-toity nobility (not to be confused with Hoity Toity, who is actually a pony living in Canterlot), and have it considered a totally acceptable means of running a government! Also they play a form of hoofball where neither magic _nor_ wings are allowed, but ultra-violence apparently is, and routinely riot in the streets over the performance of their favorite hoofball teams.

Then there's the Griffin Empire, where they consider themselves highly enlightened for not eating their ungulate subjects very much (they spare ponies, but not cows or sheep... helps to have the Alicorn of the Sun come from your species, I suppose. Celestia lets the little people self-govern for the most part, but she draws the line at pony-eating anywhere in the world.) Why, I remember the days when the entire territory currently claimed by griffins was overrun with dragons... of course, I might have had something to do with why that's not the case any longer, but when I ran things, the dragons were still _there_, just... possibly not entirely and completely sane enough to reproduce. Looks like while I was out of circulation, the griffins killed a whole lot of crazy dragons. Good riddance, I say. I wasn't going to kill them myself, not after defeating them as thoroughly as I did, but... you know, you'd think crazy dragons would be endlessly amusing, but truth was they got pretty boring within a century or two.

And then there's where the non-crazy dragons went. The entire southern continent of this hemisphere _used_ to be dominated by the feathered serpents (well, it used to be dominated by the draconequui, but sadly, those glory days happened before I was born, and the quetzalcoatls moved in from the far south once my kind were all dead), but the dragons of Western Neighropa who kept their sanity did it by running for Southern Amareica, and apparently I never noticed at the time because I was too busy having fun with the Neighropan dragons. Well, no one ever accused me of being detail oriented. So now there are nations down there of dragons and quetzalcoatls and sea serpents living together the way the pony tribes do up here, with an occasional admixture of Eastern dragons and even the occasional _long-ma_ (funny how they swear up and down that they are not draconequui despite the fact that, well, frankly, they basically are. I'm sure it has nothing to do with not wanting to be associated with me; I'd consider that positively insulting.)

Of course the further north you go, the more disorganized, violent and disharmonious the dragons are, which explains why ponies in general seem to have no idea that dragon nations even exist. Not that the civilized dragons are remotely peaceful; they're constantly at war with each other, warlords and matriarchs overthrowing each other in a perpetual churn of power, but they do manage to stick together in sufficiently large groups to _have_ a war. See, now, that's harmony for you. When total disharmony reigns, no creature can actually get enough other creatures to team up with them in order to _have_ a war. There were never any wars when I was the Superdave of Equestria! And ponies think harmony is so peaceful. I ought to take Twilight Sparkle down to the dragon nations to see what harmony gone wrong can do.

...oh, I just had to remind myself of what I'm trying to not think about, didn't I?

Yes, I'm sure you've guessed it. I went on a short world tour so I wouldn't have to think about having to face... bleah, _Anon_ again. (Seriously, that's his name? I can just picture his momma rocking him in her monkey arms, crooning, "Who's my little nameless one? Yes, you are! You don't have a name, no you don't!" Admittedly maybe I don't have room to talk, considering that I was equally nameless until the day my mother died, but a draconequus adult without a name would have been like a pony adult without a cutie mark, and besides, my mother called me Child, not Nameless.)

I don't want to be having this fight. I want to have fun. I want to explore. I want to see if I can bring about the end of the perpetual warfare within the dragon lands by making them all hate each other so much they won't stick together well enough to form an army. I want to enjoy the lovely disharmony between Saddle Arabia, Camelstan, Minos and Tauros. I want to find out if I can get them to crown me Great Dalmuti of Neighypt for making it rain even if the rain is green lemonade. I want to see if Scorpan the Peacemaker is really as badflank as everyone says he is or if I can make him flip out, give up on harmony and go become a hermit somewhere crying into his beer about what he did to his poor big bad bro. I want a rematch with Apep for the honor of Chaos (that's a joke, son, laugh! I said laugh!) I want to find Ar where she's sleeping, tickle her until she wakes up and see if she's really as hot as legend says (in the sense of attractive... she was a dragon who was a chaos avatar, I'm fairly sure she was as hot as she wanted to be in the literal sense.) The last time I was out and free I spent all my time tormenting ponies, but there's a whole world out there to be introduced to my chaos! Admittedly I'm not as ignorant of the changes to the world as Loonie was when she came back - connection to disharmony, dreamwalking, and being able to view other realities kept me relatively _au courant_ in comparison to the Moon Maid - but feeling things happen at a distance, or viewing somepony's dream of events, isn't nearly the same thing as experiencing it for yourself. Zebrica was loads of fun, and when I think about the fact that I could do the same thing in so many other nations, with so many other creatures, all over the world... and instead I'm stuck in a cave [trembling with fear of] worried about some stupid human... This is _completely_ unfair.

Unfortunately I know better.

They have their Elements back, after all. If I go run off somewhere and completely ignore Anon and pals, I'll get distracted and forget to keep looking behind me and one day bam, they'll sneak up on me and I'll be a statue again. Or Anon will chop me to bits. Or both. I'm not sure how both would work, I'm fairly sure that my statue was virtually indestructible given the number of times during the first few months after Celestia and Luna first turned me into a bird bathroom that some pony or other tried to take a sledgehammer to me, throw me off a cliff, blast me with magic or drill holes in me, but if anyone could manage to smash an indestructible statue it would be Anon, since the limitations of the rules of magic don't seem to apply to him. You cannot imagine how much this irritates me. _I_ am supposed to be the only one that the rules don't apply to! And honestly, that's because there's a superset of the rules, the laws of metamagic, that do cover me and what I do, and just because ponies don't know what those rules are and think I have to abide by unicorn magic rules, that doesn't make their ignorance _my_ problem.

Maybe there's a super-superset of rules Anon is covered by. I wonder how I'd go about finding out what they are?...

Well. I know some of them. And one of them strongly suggests that I'm not getting out of this fight.

Let me go on with my story and explain what I do know about Anon.

* * *

><p>When we last left our intrepid and handsome hero, he had narrowly escaped death at the hands of the psychotic human, and had retreated to this very cave to contemplate how a Seventh Element of Magic was even possible. Upon such contemplation, he realized that in fact everything he had been doing since coming back home to Equestria was, in fact, stupid beyond belief, and normally entirely outside the range of what he'd have chosen to do... which implied that he was mind-controlled somehow, and only now, back home, was he free of the insidious control. So he began to think to himself, <em>how long can I keep up writing about myself in the third person before I get totally sick of it?<em> And the answer was, about this long.

No, what I actually thought to myself was that I needed to do some research.

I'd had sources of information available to me, while I was trapped in stone. When I was fully awake and paying attention, ie, not manufacturing a lucid daydream for myself or opening myself up to the collective unconscious, I could hear more or less anything that happened in Canterlot Gardens, and for reasons I'll explain later I was fairly good at deciphering snippets of caught sound from outside the gardens. I also had my Discord Sense ™ (hey, if Pinkie can have a Pinkie Sense...), which allows me to feel any major occurrence of disharmony pretty much anywhere on the planet, and by feeling out the shape of it I could generally figure out who the disharmony was happening between and what sort it was. When I was asleep, I could dreamwalk... my ability to _affect_ the dreams of others was almost nonexistent, aside from pre-Nightmare Luna (I didn't actually have the ability to affect Luna's dreams either, but she had the ability to sense _me_, which meant I could goad her most entertainingly), but I could watch. And I could open vision portals into possible futures, alternate presents, and nearly anything that happened in the past.

If this is sounding like I had plenty to watch to keep myself entertained... imagining cutting off your tongue, your legs, your wings (if you have them) and your horn (if you have one) and lying in a bed in a movie theater all day long. Exactly how entertaining would those movies have to be to compensate for the fact that you can't move or talk? I thought so. So hopefully we'll have no more of this "oh surely it wasn't that bad because you didn't go totally insane" sort of talk, and move on, shall we?

The point is, I wasn't wholly ignorant of the world around me while I was trapped (forsooth, had such been otherwise, I might verily have arisen from my stone entombment speaking thusly to all ye ponies, and in such way have made of myself a laughing-stock, the object of jest and jape rather than the jester in self. Truly 'tis fortune that upon my arousal the command of today's vernacular was mine, or none might understand me save Luna and Celestia. Oh, if 'twere my fate how cruel would it have been, to be understood solely by dullard alicorns of ennui!) But I didn't know anything at all about Anon, how he got here, how he ended up with an Element even in the mundane sense of where he got it from, let alone how it could possibly exist, or what his relationship was to the others. They'd seemed very, very close, weirdly so really, but then the Elements worked off friendship between the Bearers, so I supposed that perhaps that might have explained the possessiveness and overprotectiveness I'd seen. Or perhaps the girls were trying to balance out his stupid, non-reciprocal Element of _Protection_ by protecting him, so it would be reciprocal like the others. Though that continued to fail to explain how he'd been able to use it by itself. Elements of Harmony, by themselves, were useless.

So I set out to learn as much as I could about the world, without revealing myself to anypony.

First I hit the headquarters of the Equestrian Associated Press in Manehattan. A free press has always been near and dear to my heart; nothing generates controversy like the news. While most other institutions of government, business or academia seek a calm, happy, pacified population, the press knows that what bleeds, leads, because what the public craves to know about are the most chaotic and disharmonious things that might be happening in their world. The EAP receives news wires by telegraph and retransmits them all over Equestria so that if there's a massive brush fire in Appleoosa, or a politician indicted for corruption in Baltimare, or a model in Canterlot goes out in public with a few hairs loose from her manestyle, every newspaper in Equestria can print the information. All the news that's fit to print, and plenty of the news that isn't. I slipped into the building, late at night, located their filing cabinets, and took them, replacing them with solid chocolate replicas. While obviously everypony was going to know it was me, I thought it most likely that they'd assume I turned the filing cabinets, contents and all, _into_ chocolate, thus destroying the archive of news articles. I strongly doubted anypony would realize I needed to catch up on the news.

Then I took the filing cabinets home and bespelled the articles to read themselves to me. As perhaps one might _possibly_ have guessed from my name, I'm very much at home in the center of cacophony. As I mentioned earlier, the chaos I prefer is the chaos of complexity, of so many patterns that no pony can distinguish them; I, however, am a different story. Understanding fifty-three news articles reading themselves to me at a time is an enjoyable challenge for me, a good hard workout for my brain. I made it a little more interesting (and _much_ funnier) by speeding them up so they sounded like how you might imagine squirrels or bunnies would talk, if they could. Within a day or two, I'd gotten through the entire archive.

What I gathered from it was that Anon had appeared in Ponyville, coming out of the Everfree Forest, about a week prior to the wedding of Princess Cadance and Twilight's Big Bootied Brother Furry Fatso, or I think that's what that silly acronym stood for, anyway. He had accompanied the Bearers to the wedding, which had been crashed by a particularly ambitious Changeling queen and her hive. During the resulting altercation, Celestia's clever trick for hiding the Elements really, really well backfired, as none of the Bearers were able to get in to get their Elements, but through some means wholly unexplained by any news article, Anon found the Element of Protection, proved to be its Bearer, and proceeded to more or less annihilate all the Changelings in Canterlot, of which there were quite a number. He was then given a medal and a stained glass window, which I resolved to change into a picture of him on the toilet at the first available opportunity.

The interesting thing about all this was that the day after the wedding was the day I got free. As I might have mentioned earlier, I was too busy doing a happy dance of delight at my freedom, in Zebrica, to think much about how or why it had happened. So I thought about it now.

Of course I'd noticed the Changeling invasion - chaos and disharmony on that scale wouldn't have escaped me anywhere in Equestria, let alone in my own back yard. Superficially, one might guess that that was what had given me a flood of power and broken my bonds. But it didn't match up. When Goodnight Woon had her jealous hissyfit and launched an uprising against her sister, there had been a _lot_ more chaos. Oh, that had been so deliciously painful, like being presented with the most gloriously delectable-smelling banquet right in front of you, only to find that you're chained to your chair and can't raise a paw to take a morsel of it. The bonds of Harmony had held me tight; I'd caught only the tiniest crumbs of power from that event, to the point where it would have taken me twenty thousand years of massive civil unrest to gather enough energy to break loose. Only when the Elements had reset in the process of transferring to new Bearers had my bonds begun to weaken, and it was a year after they'd finalized and transferred entirely to their new Bearers before I'd been able to gather enough power from disharmony to break myself free. One battle with a Changeling horde could not have begun to possibly make the tiniest chink in my prison, unless the Elements were shifting again.

Well. Transforming from six Bearers to seven was certainly a shift. Not a shift that seemed even remotely possible, but certainly a shift. But even then, a change from one set of Bearers to another had still left me gathering power for years, for a whole additional year after the shift was done, and I was as weak as a kitten when I'd first gotten out... admittedly if you've ever seen a kitten in action you'd know they're capable of quite a lot of chaos, but the point is, I'd had to start slow. A bit of chocolate rain in Ponyville, a bit of cola raining onto Cloudsdale. Chaos is the gift that keeps on giving; I put some power into generating a bit of chaos, and ponies react with such sheer horror and confusion, I gather far more power from them than I lost creating the chaos. It hadn't taken me long to build up to speed, it's true, but there would have been no way I could have teleported to Zebrica right after breaking loose that time.

Something hadn't just shifted the load the Elements were carrying and loosened my bonds. Something had charged me up. Someplace there had been a massive wave of chaos, and I'd missed it... and so had these news articles.

I went exploring Equestria, wandering invisibly through towns, trying to find what had changed. When I thought back to that day, I remembered _feeling_ a building wave of disruption and transformation all throughout that week; I'd been very excited, though I hadn't for a moment expected it would free me when it hit its peak. I remembered trying to find it, trying to stretch my senses, and coming up with nothing. It had tasted fresh, like change, not stale like entropy. But I hadn't for the life of me been able to feel out what exactly it was. On the day of that gloriously chaotic invasion, I'd thought to myself, _oh, this was it all along_, and by the time I would have been able to tell that no, the invasion couldn't account for it... I was free and paying exactly no attention to any of the problems I'd been worrying about in stone. In fact I'd kind of forgotten about them.

This didn't worry me nearly so much as lapses like thinking I was being original and cutting edge by repeating myself; I _knew_ why I'd forgotten about them. Sun! Sky! Lungs that can breathe! Food! Muscles that can move! My powers! Flying! Food! Colors! Sounds that aren't muffled by going through rock! Smells! Touching things! Hilariously terrified zebras! Food! My powers! Being able to stretch! Being able to lay down and sleep! Dancing! Wiggling! Food! No, it was entirely reasonable that I'd lost track of wondering about what that chaos I'd been detecting might be, once I was out.

Something had to have changed. A _lot_. And yet there was nothing in the papers.

At this point I need to briefly digress into another explanation of chaos, entropy, and information theory.

You ponies think "information" is intelligible, understandable knowledge. "Pinkie Pie is a baker" is information. "Qtsafwjofjwojoeq" is not information. "_Aujourd'hui, maman est morte"_ is not information unless you understand Prench, in which case it is. "Princess Celestia is a potato" is a lie and therefore not information. "A long long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Princess Celestia was a potato" is fiction and therefore not information. However, the truth is that they are _all_ information. To distinguish between information that has a meaning, and information that does not, we can use the terms "signal" and "noise." Signal is information that is meaningful; noise is information that is not. And one pony's signal is another pony's noise. To a pony who speaks only Equestrian, anything in Prench is noise, but to a polyglot like _moi_ (which, for those of you who don't know Prench, means "me"), Prench is signal. For that matter my fifty-three newspaper articles reading themselves to me at high speed would have been noise to any pony, even Tia and Lulu. But because I have a truly astonishing ability to distinguish signals from each other and parse them into separate meaning so they don't degrade into meaningless noise, to me those articles were signal.

The truth is, the whole world is information. This startles you. To you, information is what's held in books. Chairs are not held in books, therefore chairs are not information. But when _I_ look at a chair, I see it as a collection of pieces of information, and if I change some of that information, the chair changes. It becomes a banana, or it walks off, or it tries to eat the hapless pony sitting in it. Magic is the manipulation of information, and frequently, the transformation of it.

Now, if you shout off the side of a mountain, out to another mountain, you'll hear an echo... at first. It'll die off quickly. What happened to your signal? It degraded to noise, and then to nothingness, because it ran out of energy. This is the form of chaos called "entropy", disorder caused by a loss or transference of energy. Entropy annoys me because it disorders what it affects by making it _less_ complex. It's still disorder, so it still generates magical energy I can use, but it's not... hmm... flavorful. When chaos is caused by things becoming _more_ complex, when information becomes more dense, that produces much tastier magical energy. Disharmony is by definition more complex than harmony, because in harmony, signals are synchronized, and to a certain extent their behavior matches each other or can be predicted from each other. A disharmonious signal could be any signal at all that _doesn't_ match, and the world of what doesn't match is always so much larger than the world of what does.

One way or another, when information changes, it gives me power. Destruction is entropic change. Creation is change toward complexity. However, for either one to have happened on the scale that would have refueled me so thoroughly after the Elements drained me such a short while ago, it really should have turned up in the papers. How could the world have undergone a massive change and nopony noticed?

So I went exploring, invisibly walking (and flying) amongst ponies in search of whatever it was that had changed. And at first, I didn't see it. Their world seemed every bit as idyllically peaceful and dull as it had ever been. Earth ponies still worked the fields and took their goods to market, pegasi still micromanaged the weather, unicorns still stumbled through life using only the tiny fraction of the glorious energies they were born to command that would help them enact the picture on their flanks. Same old same old.

Until I realized... where were all the stallions?

Now, just in case you're reading this at a time when the changes are still in effect - which you probably are, because why would they revert if I haven't beaten him yet? - you need to know this. Historically there has always been an imbalance in favor of mares, but throughout most of pony history it has not been all that large. I'm not the guy you want to go to for numbers, so I couldn't quantify it, but in a class of say 20 foals, a little over half of them would be fillies, maybe 12 to 8 instead of 10 and 10. During times of war and organized violence, the imbalance increases significantly, but I think we all know how _harmonious_ and _peaceful_ Equestria's been for the past several centuries. If you stroll down the street in an earth pony town like Ponyville you might not notice so many stallions, because a disproportionate number of them are doing work that involves physical labor, tilling their fields or restocking the shelves, and whether you're in Ponyville, Cloudsdale or Fillydelphia, the fact that the Royal Guard is around ninety percent male means that many of the boys are off in Canterlot. Males tend to do the work that involves being away from home for long periods of time, as well; they're the lumberjacks, and they're OK. Pegasus and unicorn stallions with water-magic talents may be off at sea. Nothing stops the marefolk from doing that kind of work, of course, but Equestria's a matriarchy that runs on _friendship_; mares stick close to home where their power base is. In the big cities, where power concentrates in noble families or where it's not about how many you know but who they are, this tendency is less pronounced, so you see a more even balance of genders out on the streets.

Here's something else you need to know. I'm not going to be running for Her Royal Pinkness' job anytime soon; I dislike nearly everything to do with love and romance and would prefer I never had to deal with such sappy concepts again, but unfortunately for me, Canterlot Gardens has been the go-to place for romantic trysts between Canterlot citizens for an unpleasantly long period of time. I have heard far, far too many couples whispering sweet nothings to each other or making loud, smacky kissyface noises. Few of them actually went so far as to have _sex_ in the gardens (more's the pity; that might have been fun to listen to), but trust me, I have been present at enough passionate clinches that Cadance ought to be paying me damages for mental cruelty. And I can tell you that the majority of these lovey doves were mare/stallion pairings. Again, numbers and I don't get along, but I'd guess as many as three-fourths of them were heterosexual couplings, and of the remaining couples, about two-thirds were mare on mare and the remaining third were _fabulous._

I didn't really notice this at the time, of course. As I said, I'm not interested in romance. I have as much interest in _sex_ as any other red-blooded draconequus male (yes, it is red, I certainly saw enough of it when Anon cut off my tail that I can certify this), but ponies having sex with each other, without even inviting me to watch, let alone join in, isn't really a topic of pressing concern to me. And since personally I can't be bothered to limit myself to a single species or a single gender when I do go looking for playmates, the question of whether a mare is sucking face with a mare, a stallion or a grapefruit is normally not one I care about. But I have a very, very good memory, and when I was trapped in stone, I paid a great deal of attention to ponies any time they were near enough to my statue that I could easily hear them, regardless of what they were doing or saying or how unbelievably dull I'd have found it if I'd been free to go pay attention to something else. I remember the pony pairings I didn't care about at the time, well enough to assess their approximate gender balance and makeup.

You know what I never got to hear? A threesome. Or moresome. I suppose it's possible that some of the chattering groups of friends I overheard went home and had wild sex with each other, but of the partnering ponies gazing up at the Mare in the Moon and murmuring pet words to each other while leaning up against the convenient backrest my plinth provided, I can't remember any of them being a group of more than two.

Herds are _rare._ They turn up in times of unrest - during the wars between the pony tribes, there was a severe shortage of earth stallions, because when ten earth stallions go up against a unicorn battlemage, nine of them die in order to distract the battlemage enough that the tenth can get in and buck the mage's head off. (Oh, you don't think ponies were ever that violent to each other? _Au contraire, mes amis_, your species _eagerly_ sought to enslave or commit genocide against itself when you split along the tribal lines. Windigos don't show up because of petty quarrels.) So there were few enough remaining stallions that earth ponies herded, back then.

And when I was in charge, there were herds, albeit more polyamorous than polygynous ones, on the logic that... well, I _am_ the Spirit of Disharmony. I used to amuse myself frequently by influencing ponies to break up marriages or turn their kids out the door. (Hey, don't look at me like that. I was an orphan, left behind in the wilderness to fend for myself from the age of four, and I turned out just fine! There were pie trees and lollipop flowers and chocolate snow everywhere; no foal starved on my watch. Lost all their teeth, maybe.) When I unbalance a pony's personality it doesn't last that way forever, though, and ponies found that their families would hold together much better if they formed larger ones, so someone could keep the home fires burning and watch the kids until the unbalancing wore off and their lovers came back to themselves. (Eventually I figured out that this was what they were doing, but by then, I'd decided to go big or stay home, and I'd treat an entire town at once to an upside-down mindset for a week or two. Herds didn't help them much with that.)

During times of peace, herds are not common. Lesbian relationships are _common_, but hardly a majority, and stallion on stallion does actually happen, maybe only half as often as the lesbian relationships but it's hardly unheard of.

I'm sure none of this makes any sense to you, because the world I'm describing, the world that existed for millennia up until the moment Anon changed it, is not the world you know. Because what I found out when I noticed the stallion dearth is what you probably believe the world has always been.

I had observed that there were far, far fewer stallions than I expected to see. I went looking for them in the places I'd expect to find stallions, and, aside from the Royal Guard, I found mares instead. Mares tilling the fields, mares cutting down trees, mares sailing ships... usually, mares in lesbian couples or threesomes or more, and I could tell this because despite the fact that I was observing them at their jobs, they tended to be all over each other, soppily affectionate and exchanging highly unprofessional pet names while logging or sailing or whatever. In the Royal Guard, a majority were still stallions, but the guard itself seemed... smaller. More ceremonial, less capable of fighting any sort of military force. Admittedly they haven't had to fight a military force in centuries, but they're supposed to be able to if they have to.

And where I found stallions still living and working at ordinary jobs, I found that most of them had two, three or more wives. Herding was more common than pairing, now. (By this point, you understand, I was actively looking for anomalies relating to gender; it's normally utterly beneath me to care how many wives the stallion from St. Ives has.) And where I found a two-pony marriage still, most of them were two mares. There were still _some_ traditional couples - the Cakes in Ponyville, Cadance and her boytoy - but for the most part, what I was seeing involved either two mares and no stallion, two or more mares and no stallion, or two or more mares plus a stallion, with the old school pattern of one mare and one stallion almost absent.

Now, far be it for me to look down on anyone's fun! Why, if Equestria had suddenly exploded into a hotbed of polyamorous perversity because of some sort of social change I could see, I'd be all for it! After all, I was an immoral polyamorous sex beast _before_ it was cool. I could really enjoy a world where everywhere I turn there's mare on mare action... if it weren't for the fact that no pony alive appeared to be aware that this was a _change._

So I did something that horrifies me to this day. Something so awful, I shudder uncontrollably when I look back on it.

I took the form of an ordinary pony, went to the central library of Manehattan, and went back through two years' worth of newspapers... _reading the wedding announcements._ Guh! I want to scrape my brain out with a whisk broom and a can of maple syrup.

I didn't repeat this experiment anywhere else, but I didn't need to. Prior to Princess Cadance's wedding, the wedding announcements were exactly what I would have expected... mostly announcements for mare & stallion couples, with a fair amount of mare/mare and a small but noticeable number of stallion/stallion. The first announcement of a herd wedding, between a stallion and three mares, was the day before Cadance's wedding, with the actual date set a month in the future. After Cadance's wedding, I couldn't find any traditional mare/stallion announcements. Admittedly at that point I'd been free less than a month, and I broke loose the day after her wedding, but... there hadn't been any time prior where there had been _no_ mare/stallion weddings announced for longer than two days, let alone a month.

I already knew there was nothing in the papers discussing the change. And there should have been! An upheaval like this was only possible if either an enormous number of stallions vanished into thin air, or transformed into mares overnight. There should have been rioting! Grieving widows screaming at Celestia to find their husbands, if they'd vanished, or former stallions shrieking at their leaders to solve this problem and restore their lost manhood, if they'd changed gender! There should have been panic in the streets! There should have been _chaos!_

But there wasn't. The change had happened, it had created such a massive transformation of information that it had filled me up with energy, just the same as if there _had_ been chaos... but there was no disharmony. There was no visible disruption of order. Something had radically changed and ponies just went on with their lives as if it had _always_ been that way.

This horrified me. I love change, I live for it. But to change everything underneath our feet and leave us unaware of how it happened, or when, and, for the ponies, even _that_ it happened?

I had to admit I had a bit of an existential crisis. Kidnapped a few mares from a small town near Vanhoover and forced them to tell me what they saw when I changed things. I made a hill into a checkerboard bowl, filled it with giant cornflakes, made the cornflakes float as if they were in milk, and made them ooze pine sap so the ponies kept getting stuck to them. Turned one of them into a balloon and used static to stick her to another. Chased them around with giant waffles that were trying to eat them. Caused some of the checkers to be quicksand and then rearranged them when the ponies figured out where the safe places to stand were. The whole time I kept asking them, "Now what am I doing? What did I just change?" By the end most of them were crying too hysterically or too shellshocked to keep talking to me, but one of them managed to describe my chaos back to me all the way to the end of the session, so I didn't do any of the apocalyptic or horrible things I'd threatened to do to them if they refused to talk to me... I sent them back home, completely unharmed. Well, I might have rearranged their manes some and cast illusions to make it look like I'd switched their cutie marks, but that all would wear off in a day or two.

As nearly as I could tell, reality was still real. Things I set into motion randomly, without knowing what I was creating, could be described by ponies who were looking at it, before I turned to look myself. Ponies still occasionally did things I didn't realize they were going to do. This wasn't a dream I'd fallen into, in stone, and forgotten it was a dream. I could be fairly sure of that, at least to the extent I can ever be sure of that.

Yes, you're glaring at me now, I'm sure. I did terrible, terrible things to those poor ponies, you say. I terrorized them. I made them think I'd kill them or subject them to fates worth than death if they didn't cooperate. Well, yes, but if you thought there was a significant chance that reality wasn't real, would you really care about the welfare of possibly imaginary ponies you were using to perform a reality check? Besides, none of them suffered any worse pain than exhaustion or the nasty feeling of pine sap in your coat, and in the end none of them came to any harm, and if you're so worried about _their_ sanity, why aren't you worried about mine? Just because I don't behave like what you think a sane pony would act like when I'm at my best, you think I deserve to be left in some solipsistic hell where I can't be sure reality even _exists?_ I never trapped ponies in a dream for longer than a single night! Well, okay, except for Luna, but given that her turning me to stone was what left me in a place where I started losing track of the difference between reality and dreams... _she_ had it coming.

I'd confirmed that what I remembered being true had been true, and I seemed to be the only creature who remembered it that way. I'd confirmed I wasn't trapped in a dreamworld. That left only one possibility, horrible as it was. Someone had actually altered reality.

Don't tell me I'm a hypocrite. I _don't_ alter reality. I alter things _in_ reality. If reality is a house, I rearrange the furniture, replace the drapes, pull up the carpet, repaint the walls and hang new pictures, but I don't turn the house into Ponyville Station, and most especially I don't make it so the house always _was_ Ponyville Station. Of course, you think it was always Ponyville Station and I'm just insane, or trying to trick you. The historical records haven't been altered to match everypony's memories. At least, not last time I looked. You can confirm that what I'm saying is true. You can check it.

Listen, this isn't what I do! This is radical change, yes, but there's no chaos. There's no _disharmony._ I want ponies to notice when I change something! I want them to look out their windows and yell "SWEET FILLY CELESTIA ON A POGO STICK, IT'S RAINING UMBRELLAS!" I want them to be shocked, amazed, horrified, discombobulated, confused. I don't want them to just go on with their day as if nothing had ever happened! This is a perfectly harmonious change, a massive transformation of absolutely everything that bothers nopony because nopony can remember that it happened at all. Aren't you _horrified?_ I am! The bedrock of reality, the consensus of the collective unconscious, the one constant value even _I_ could never bear to change because if you change it, it becomes impossible to measure or even notice any other changes... and it's been altered. Do you feel violated? You should! I do! And I'm the only one whose memories weren't altered, probably because I was trapped in stone when the change happened, and if magic could alter my stone form in any way, I'd have been able to use chaos to alter myself into something that could actually do something, a long time ago.

This is _not_ like you ponies utterly losing your marbles over what I do to the world with my chaos. This is completely different.

Still think I'm a hypocrite, flipping my own lid over someone doing to the world something very similar to what I do, except I'm not the one who did it? Fine, whatever, believe what you like about me, but if you hate my chaos you should hate this even _more._ Have you realized yet that thousands of ponies have either been vanished from reality entirely, with their loved ones having no memory of their existence, or have had their memories so massively rewritten they've undergone a gender change and they _don't know it?_ Do you understand now why I'm afraid? Do you know now why I'm willing to face a maniac who's already cut off my tail once and nearly killed me, in the desperate hope that if I can find a way to stop him, I can restore reality?

If I was going to change thousands of stallions into mares, I'd make _quite_ sure they remembered what they were supposed to be. Fine, I'm sadistic, I'm disharmonious, I do these kinds of things specifically because they upset ponies. But I wouldn't make it permanent, and I wouldn't make it so nopony remembered the world the way it had been before. That makes me better than this. Doesn't it?

* * *

><p>Even knowing that someone had altered reality, I didn't immediately assume it was Anon. He'd seemed really pretty pathetic when I'd fought him. Okay, he'd beaten me, so he wasn't <em>that<em> pathetic, but he seemed so... average. Unnotable, aside from being on a planet where no other of his species resides. He wasn't a great intellect, and I didn't yet understand why I'd put up such a poor showing against him, but I did know that his swordfighting skills weren't that spectacular. I'd just gotten really, really unlucky, I thought.

When someone has done something, and you know absolutely nothing about who they are or how they did it, the one reliable clue you may be able to turn to is this: who benefits? So I considered that.

Who benefits from altering the structure of the Elements of Harmony in some way to add a seventh that can be used independently? Not the Tree of Harmony itself, the new Element was too unlike the others. Order, maybe, and Matrisse had actually attempted one of these bedrock changes to reality once; of we three avatars Matrisse is the only one with the power to alter the playing field, because it's the entity that sets and enforces the rules. Except it's suffering from a slight case of unfocusedness due to the fact that I smashed it into tiny pieces, and if enough of Matrisse had come back together to do something like this I would have felt the shift in the thaumic field. I can detect changes in the balance of magic, and that would have been a major one.

Who benefits from altering the structure of Equestrian society so there are a lot fewer males, and herding and lesbianism have become common? A male who wants a herd and doesn't want a lot of fair competition. But how could anypony who wielded such power have such a ridiculously venal motive? I mean... I don't wish to be crude here, but put it this way, when you have the kind of power that can make your dreams come true, a lack of nookie ceases to be a major crisis. Self-satisfaction takes on a whole new meaning when instead of being limited to Madame Paw, you can have Madame Realistic Full-Tactile Illusion Of Absolutely Anypony You Want. Entities as powerful as I am just aren't motivated all that much by sex, because it's too easy to get almost anything you might want. Love is another story, but the kind of love that involves mind-controlling your partner and altering their memories so they think they have always loved you is not satisfying. Believe me, I've tried it. It doesn't work. Even altering their memories so they don't remember that they ever stopped loving you, when they were your lover once but broke up with you over irreconcilable differences like the fact that they think you're a monster now, turns out to be tremendously unsatisfying and actually rather painful.

Who benefits from making me act like an idiot? Any of the Elements of Harmony, including Anon, but none of the ponies demonstrated any such power in the past. Anon was the only one of the group who _could_ have done it.

What's the likelihood that the mares of Harmony would embrace a new member who was a male stranger of an unknown species, who they just met, as thoroughly as they seemed to have? Well, they did make friends with each other shockingly quickly, but on the other hand, I happened to know that all of them had been linked since the day of Twilight's magical surge, that the force that grants ponies their cutie marks had connected them somehow. If someone rewrote reality so that there had always been a Seventh Element, perhaps they might have also rewritten it so the bearer of that Element would be connected to the others in the same way, and more or less instafriend them. But _why_ would anyone have chosen to bring a human here to wield the Element of Protection, when there are plenty of none-too-bright stallions who could have been tapped to do the job?

But I was looking at this the wrong way. What if the point hadn't been to create a Seventh Element, and then choose a human to wield it? What if the human had come first, and the Seventh Element had been created _for_ him?

If Anon was the one who had done this, then the timing matched; the transformation of information started happening _after_ he came to this world. Wouldn't an entity who wanted to alter reality and then pull in some poor sucker from another world to take a role in the new reality have performed the alterations _first_ and then dragged their target in?

If Anon had done this, then there being a Seventh Element of Harmony for him to wield would fit, because he'd have been the one to create it for himself. To give himself power, and a role. And that would explain why I had been an idiot in his presence. But why make me an _uncreative_ idiot? And where did the business with the stallions fit in?

So I went and spied on Anon in Ponyville, invisibly. Amazing how much you learn when you turn invisible and coil around one of the branches of Twilight's library tree.

I learned that he knew a great deal about the Bearers, and always had - in his world, they apparently had a fairly accurate fictional adaptation of the Bearers' lives running as a popular entertainment, but most humans were unaware that the adaptation _was_ an adaptation, assuming it to be pure fiction. (I assumed. Either that or our lives really are fictional stories written by coatless monkeys, but I am having a hard enough time with my grasp on reality to be willing to go there.) I learned that _everyone_ in Ponyville liked him except for two bratty fillies, who he had demonstrated considerable cruelty to in the course of teaching them to stop bullying the sisters of the Bearers... despite which, the father of one of the bratty fillies liked and respected him even more for "knocking some sense" into his daughter. Because everypony knows, if you can't manage to keep your child from misbehaving, you'll consider a coatless ape five times your daughter's size who roughs her up to teach her respect a gift from the heavens! I learned that his hands were considered wonderful and vital tools that everypony in Ponyville wanted him to make use of to perform any number of activities. Oh, if I'd only known hands were such beloved accoutrements by ponies, I'd have manifested myself some! Certainly I wouldn't have encountered fear and suspicion and disgust at being an unusual creature, unique to this world and unfamiliar to ponies, if I'd just had _hands!_ I imagine little Spikey-Wikey will be thrilled to learn this as well!

I also learned that all of the Element Bearers, who he referred to frequently as the "Mane Six", were herding with him. _All_ of them. With occasional orgies.

I'm very much in favor of orgies. I'm very much in favor of orgies involving multiple ponies having sex with a male who has hands and comes from a completely different species and is the only representative of his kind on the planet. But I'm not in favor of involving ponies whose personalities have been altered by said male in such orgies unless they specifically requested that said male perform the alteration. And I'm very much _not_ in favor of _rewriting the entire universe_ and disappearing or gender-switching thousands of ponies so that their failure to compete with me will allow me to get ponies who wouldn't otherwise have wanted me involved in my orgies.

It was Anon. It had to be Anon who had done this. Whatever other entity might have thought there was a benefit to creating a Seventh Element of Harmony and then picking a human for the role, no such entity could possibly have thought it was a good idea to make _all_ of the Bearers of the Elements fall in love with him. After all, _friendship_ is magic... lust is chaotic. The potential for jealousy tearing the group apart if they were all in love with the same male was a terrible, terrible idea, from the perspective of someone who wanted to make the Elements more powerful by adding a seventh. But that potential would be completely ignored, if the one who made the change was a selfish twit who really wanted to have sex with six attractive, powerful mares and didn't think he could win them over the hard way.

And yet he showed no signs of knowing what he'd done. I spied on him a _lot_, as the seven of them searched for Luna and the missing Elements. I'd have thought that one of them would have thought of the Castle of the Pony Sisters right away, but even _Twilight_ didn't seem to think of anything unless Anon said something that gave her the idea. However, I saw no active use of magic from him, and I never heard him say or do anything that would suggest he _knew_ he'd made them love him or he knew he'd made them his sycophants, unable to think for themselves unless it pertained to their special areas of talent.

It wasn't as if he was running around throwing mind control powers about willy-nilly. It was more like... he'd turned Equestria into a stage, and our lives a play, with himself in the starring role. Except it was a fairly terrible play because, as the star, he was the leader, the one who came up with all the good ideas, and in reality his ideas were fairly stupid, so everypony else had to play the role of idiots in order to let him shine.

I have no idea how his power works. But since I went out and did all that research, everything else I've seen backs up my conclusions. He wants to be a big hero, and events conspire to allow him to be. He wants to be beloved, so six mares herd with him, and don't consider it strange, because the whole world has altered such that herding, once a rare practice looked down upon by mainstream society, is now common and normal. He wants everyone to be his friend, except the ones he doesn't like; those, he wants to be his enemies, and he wants to defeat us, humiliate us, crush us and, at least in my case, kill us.

* * *

><p>The desire to confront him, to do something to harm him, is getting stronger. He doesn't want me to hole up in a cave writing down my observations about him, he wants me to go taunt him to his face and do some moderately annoying things so he has an excuse to cut me or thrash me. I want to know how long I can hold out, but at the same time, I'm afraid that if I wait too long, I'll lose myself in the emotion, and behave recklessly, and he'll kill me. It's not worth the risk.<p>

Time to go take my life into my hands and make my token appearance in front of him again. If I survive this, then the next time, I'll write about the various confrontations I've had so far, including the sad and humiliating details of the incident with my tail.


	5. Interviewing the Elements

Well, I _was_ going to go taunt Anon villainously, but at the last moment I [chickened out] had a _much_ better idea - I decided to go find my Elements of Disharmony! I had an idea where three of them were, and with three of them I might be able to zero in on the others better.

There's an odd number of Elements of Disharmony - seven rather than six, because six lines up neatly, whereas seven is both odd and a prime number, making it inherently less harmonious than six. They're Selfishness, Rage, Cruelty, Deception, Greed, Hatred and Arrogance - very much _not_ the concepts I personally think of when I think of disharmony. I'd have put a much more positive spin on the whole thing. For instance I would definitely have included Rugged Individualism. And possibly Competitive Spirit. But I'm not the one who made them; I'm just the one who gets to infuse them with power and hand them out to exemplars of these various vices to get them to go create some delicious havoc. The thing about the Elements of Disharmony is that each one, individually, has power; unlike the Elements of Harmony, where you need the full set to do anything, I could get a good bit done with just three Elements of Disharmony.

I got the Element of Arrogance back very, very easily - it was in Canterlot, in a museum. It never ceases to amaze me how _dumb_ Celestia is sometimes. She's been in how many wars, fought how many monsters and evil overlords and devourers of souls and of course me, and yet she just isn't paranoid enough, ever. Deep down inside she's still the filly who wanted to believe that the dragons were sincere about surrendering when - you know what, I'm not going to finish that sentence. Nothing good comes of my thinking about those days.

The point is, Celestia is a big fat idiot sometimes. She trusts that goodness and courage and friendship will always save the day. Equestria's got no actual standing military, though the Guard was a lot larger before Anon got hold of it, and there is a militia at least, thousands of ponies across Equestria who train on weekends waiting for a call to arms that they hope will never come. As if a militia of ponies who train on weekends is going to stand up to a professional army. Of course, the fact that she controls the sun puts Celestia in a unique situation vis-à-vis the rest of the world; she's not overly afraid of military invasion because she can always hover the sun over her enemies for a few hours to demonstrate why they should not mess with her.

The thing is, Celestia is not the first to wield the sun - Ra the Arabian alicorn in ancient Neighjypt and Amaterasu the kirin in Neighpon were two sun-wielders like Celestia, and they've both been dead a very long time. For that matter unicorns in what is now Northern Equestria and the Crystal Empire used to manage the job. Celestia's never had to deal with a sun war where another entity of similar power fights with her for control of it - when I take over the sun, Celestia can't begin to oppose me because I'm just that much more powerful than she is, and Luna's never wanted to fight with Celestia over the sun, she just wanted the sun to go away and not come back. But part of the reason Saddle Arabia is a desert is the battle Ra had with Aten, another Arabian alicorn who managed to take over the sun for himself. So Celestia's belief that no one will ever invade Equestria because they're worried about the sun being used against them is... I'd say charmingly naïve, but I stopped being charmed by Celestia's naivete a long time ago.

All of this goes to show you why a powerful magical artifact with the power to make anypony with a little bit of pride in themselves act like an egotistical, pompous twit was sitting in a museum in Celestia's _capital city_, three blocks from the palace. I mean, maybe she never noticed because the unicorn nobility and wanna-bes that populate Canterlot are already egotistical, pompous twits, but that's not a good excuse for failing to notice the magic it radiates. In my day, unicorns knew how to detect chaos magic (the ones that didn't made _great_ ten-legged hamsters), but nowadays, unicorns seem to barely be able to tell when an artifact radiates dark magic, let alone chaos magic.

It was shockingly easy to take it. I basically just walked up to the display, liquified the glass case, removed the Element, and replaced it with a facsimile that will squirt banana yogurt at any pony who handles it. Admittedly I was sort of broadcasting a "somebody else's problem" field to keep anypony from bothering to notice me or what I was doing, but really I expected more difficulties. Where was the room full of infrared lasers and explosive ordnance that I was going to have to use my fantastic flexibility and acrobatic skill to dodge my way through?

So now I have the Element of Arrogance, and a few possible candidates for who to give it to. I'm fairly certain that the Element of Greed is in the possession of a dragon way down south (really, who else would have it?) and the Element of Rage is held by the Kraken in the Mareland bay near Baltimare. They're not bearers, they're just hoarding powerful magic items. I also think the Element of Hatred is probably in the Crystal Empire but I don't think I actually want to use that one. So tomorrow I'm going to head to Baltimare to get the Element of Rage, but today I'm going to try to catch up with myself and finish telling you all about my adventures with Anon.

* * *

><p>After I figured out that Anon had warped the world, made the Element Bearers fall in deep carnal love with him and actually altered the gender balance of Equestria to make this more plausible, created a Seventh Element for himself to wield, and so on and so forth, I decided I needed more information about my enemy. I'd spied on him, of course, but nothing could beat personal knowledge of him straight from the horses' mouths, as it were.<p>

So I went first to honest Applejack, who was, as usual, bucking trees. Seriously, what kind of a life is that? Monday: buck trees. Tuesday: buck trees. Wednesday: buck trees. Thursday: get really wild and take apples to the marketplace, then buck trees. If I had to live a life like that, I think I'd have ended up hanging from one of those trees.

I coiled up in a tree she hadn't gotten to yet, waited until she got close, and then had the tree step backwards, out of her way, as she bucked. So her hooves, of course, hit thin air. "What in tarnation-?" That's what I love about these earthy farmer types, they're not shy to express their frustration with bowdlerized curse words.

She tried again, of course. This time I had the tree yell, "Hay! What's the big idea, lady?"

Applejack looked around herself. "What the - who the hay was that?"

"It's me, hay for brains! I'm right here!" the tree said in the best Manehattan accent I could give it.

She stared at the tree. "Did... are you the _tree_ talkin' to me?"

"No, I'm a giant banana. What do you think? Do I look like a big rock or something here? 'Cause I _thought_ anyone with a brain could tell I was a tree, but apparently you're dumber than a box of pears, and that's saying something when you consider how dumb pears are."

"My apple tree. Is talkin' to me."

"Pretty sure I didn't stutter, lady."

"The hay with this. I better tell Twilight and Anon about this."

"Not so fast," I said, disappointed that I was getting such a lackluster response to my prank, and grabbed her with my tail, pulling her up into the branches to face me. "Don't you know it's rude to run off without even saying 'hi' to someone?"

"Discord! I mighta known this was your fault!" She struggled, wiggling. "Put me down _right now!_"

"Now, now, no need to be so hasty," I said, bouncing her up and down a bit, mostly because she was strong enough that if I didn't disorient her she might actually be able to wiggle loose from my grip. "I'm just here for some information, and then I'll be off on my way."

"Information?" She glared at me. "You ain't gonna get any!"

"By hook or by crook, I will, dear Applejack," I said, grinning broadly at her. For some reason it unnerves ponies when I do that. It might have something to do with my random collection of carnivore teeth. "After all, you wouldn't want to _lie_ to me, would you?"

"I can keep my mouth shut without lyin' at all," Applejack retorted. "Just cause you ask a question, there ain't no reason I gotta answer you."

"And here I thought mares _loved_ to talk about the object of their affections," I said, pressing the back of my paw to my forehead. "Oh, dear, will I _ever_ understand the vagaries of love?"

"Of _love?_ What the hay are you talkin' about, Discord?"

"Anon, of course! A little birdie told me that you _love_ him, so I thought you'd be eager to tell me all about him! Isn't that what mares do when they're in love?"

"I ain't telling you a darned thing about Anon!"

"So you _don't_ love him. Why, Applejack, you naughty filly! I never took _you_ for the caddish playgirl type!"

"No - that ain't what I'm sayin'! You're twistin' my words all around, Discord! Now _put me down!_"

I'd brought her just a trifle too close to my face, forgetting how very inventive these particular mares can be sometimes, not to mention determined. She twisted her body around in my grip and kicked me in the face. A foreleg kick isn't nearly as powerful as a backleg buck, but it's nothing to sneeze at either. My head rocked backward and I lost my grip, allowing Applejack to fall to the ground, where she immediately started running.

So I warped space, making her run straight toward me. She caught on immediately, spun around and started running in the opposite direction. We played this game for a few minutes, where she'd try to charge off and then I'd flip space around so she was running back toward me again, until finally she gave up in defeat and charged directly at me, full speed, with the obvious intent of bucking or kicking me again. This time I was prepared, though, so I turned my body into chocolate taffy and when she spun on her forelegs and bucked with her backlegs... her backlegs buried themselves deep in the taffy I was now made of.

"Let me _go_, you darned varmint!"

I started giggling uncontrollably. In part because the sensation of her legs stuck in my taffy abdomen was actually kind of ticklish, but mostly because she looked ridiculous, stuck to me with her back legs buried half-deep in my stomach, balancing precariously on her forelegs. "Of - of course I will!" I said, laughing. "Here, perhaps a little lubrication to help you pull free!" I summoned up a cotton candy cloud and made it rain chocolate milk directly on top of her, turning the ground to mud that her forehooves sank into. (No comments about the unoriginality, please, I already know.)

"Let me _go!_" she shouted again.

"Oh, dear, Applejack, you seem to have caught a bad case of repetitionitis. Are you able to say anything other than 'let me go'?"

"Of course I am! Now _let me loose!_"

"But I have so many questions to ask you! Tell me more, like does he have a car?"

"A what?"

Celestia and Luna know my full range of capabilities, of course, but I'd gotten the distinct impression they'd never told their little ponies everything I can do. So Applejack would be prepared to fight back against my making her a liar... not to stop me from turning her eager to share her honest opinions about everything. _Increasing_ the trait of Honesty tends to make honest ponies happy to express themselves. "Hmmph," I said. "If you really _loved_ this Anon, you'd be desperate to tell me all about him!"

"I do love him!"

"Prove it," I challenged. "Tell me all about him. _Why_ do you love him, Applejack? How did he win your heart?" I looked directly into her eyes.

Her eyes didn't swirl - they would have if I'd used brute force, but her desire to prove her love opened the door, just as her desire to preserve her friendships had the last two times, and when I'm making ponies _more_ like themselves, it doesn't show up as if I'm hypnotizing them. Their auras brighten and turn harsh-looking, more monochromatic and sharper, the brightness wiping out shading and subtlety, but even most unicorns can't see auras unless they're trying, and a brighter aura is much less noticeable than the graying, aura-dulling effect I get when I make them into their opposites. "You'd never understand," she said, glaring behind herself. "I'll bet you've never even been in love. What would you know about how it feels to find a soulmate?"

I released her, letting her back hooves fall free of me and turning myself back into flesh. She pulled her forehooves out of the muck and turned to face me, as I knew she would. The flowery word "soulmate" told me she was under my spell, ready to spill her most honest thoughts and feelings. Applejack's actually had a much more sophisticated education than she chooses to let show, because she doesn't want to remind her family of her months as a teenage runaway living the Orange life in Manehattan. She doesn't normally perceive hiding her advanced vocabulary and educational level from other ponies as dishonest, because she sees displaying those traits as putting on airs, or so she said as a newly becutiemarked filly, returned from her adventures (remember I spied on these guys with all the meager power I had available to me in stone, from the time of Twilight's magical surge to the time I broke loose, because I knew they'd end up as the Bearers of Harmony.) Under my influence, however, the internal censor that made sure she talked like an Apple was gone, and what came out was the _full_ Applejack. "Why would I know anything about it? I need you to tell me, Applejack. Tell me how it feels to find a soulmate. Tell me why you love him."

So she did. She waxed ecstatic for the next ten minutes or so about how strong and dependable and down-to-earth Anon was, how important family was to him now that he'd lost his (apparently he had a tragic past in which his entire family was killed in a plane accident on vacation while he'd been in college, which had in some unspecified manner led him to arrive in Equestria), how understanding and kind and determined he was, yadda yadda. When I pointed out that it hardly seemed kind and dependable for him to be the lover of six mares, she retorted that the herding had been the mares' idea, and that Anon came from a world where one man paired up with one woman, so they'd had to convince him that being with all of them at once would keep there from being jealousy or conflict between them. I've discorded too many members of herds to believe that herding actually does anything to stop jealousy; it just gives ponies motivation to suppress it.

"But aren't _you_ in the slightest bit jealous?" I asked the Most Honest Mare In Equestria.

"I'm jealous of all my friends sometimes," she said. "Rarity's so much prettier than I am, and Rainbow's a blowhard but she's got the chops to get away with it, and Twilight's so darned _smart_, and Fluttershy's just so nice and Pinkie's energy never stops. Lots of times, I wish I was more like them. But I ain't jealous of Anon loving them, 'cause they're lovable. _I_ love them. I wish I was more the kind of pony they are instead of being just some simple farmer with dirt on her hooves, but I ain't, and that's why I ain't jealous of his lovin' them too. I'm just so lucky that he loves me at all, even close to as much as he loves them, 'cause I ain't the kind of mare any fella wants to take out and treat fancy, if you get what I'm sayin'. I'm lucky anyone can love me as a mare at all. Anon's the best thing that happened to me."

Part of me thought this declaration was absolutely hilarious. But... for some reason, it saddened me as well. It's true, by pony standards of beauty Applejack was probably the least conventionally attractive of her group, but that expression "conventionally attractive" is always one I wished I could burn out of the pony psyche with molten chocolate lava or something. I'd never seen or heard any evidence that Applejack was anything other than proud of herself and happy to be exactly who she was, and as I said, I've been spying on her and the other Bearers for most of their lives. She's not _my_ type - it's hard to imagine a less chaotic pony, even Pinkie's rock-obsessed sister generates chaos by being so unbearably monomaniacal about a subject that bores everyone that it's unusual and disturbing to ponies - but I'd always respected her for being exactly who she was and proud of it, even if there were a good number of ponies who'd look down on her for it.

Either she'd been hiding this kind of insecurity her entire life and my spell had brought it out of her... or Anon had warped her. I didn't know which, but... it bothered me to feel this way, ponies are my playthings and the Bearers are my enemies, I shouldn't feel any kind of sympathy for any of them... and yet I did. For... personal reasons, it bothers me when a pony who's different from the norm expected for ponies, or the norm expected by any particular group of ponies, is ashamed of that difference. There are ponies who should definitely be ashamed of who and what they are, because they're pompous twits or hypocritical boremasters or pretentious artsoids, but Applejack is not one of them.

My original plan had been to find a weakness, an insecurity and work on that to increase the disharmony between her and the other Bearers. But I couldn't do it. This particular insecurity _bothered_ me. I couldn't bring myself to make a pony _less_ proud of the differences between herself and other ponies. I told myself I was going soft (I'm still telling myself this, in fact), but it didn't change how I felt, and, well, chaos is all about going with your whims and doing what you feel like doing, and I didn't feel like making this particular bugaboo of Applejack's worse. So I didn't. I wiped her memory of the conversation, instead. (Memory's not a personality trait, but I can affect it as easily as I affect personalities, at least for the first twenty minutes or so after an event I don't want ponies to remember takes place. After that I can't neatly erase a given memory, and attempts to do so usually lead ponies to end up with giant holes in their recollection, large enough for parents, best friends, or the taste of lemonade to fall into.)

I left her confused and alone, standing in chocolatey mud, apparently trying to remember what she'd just been doing, and went off to find Rarity.

Rarity had closed up shop and was in the middle of making... something... I _think_ it was an outfit, though honestly it looked to me more like a parade float. Her sister was at school, her front door was locked, and she was in a room full of ponyquins. Perfect.

"Mommy!" I made one of the ponyquins cry. "Mommy! I'm hungry, Mommy!"

Rarity looked up, startled. "What in the world-"

"Mommy, I'm bored! Can you read me a story?" another ponyquin demanded.

"Mommy, can I have cookies?"

"Mommy, I have to go to the potty!"

"Where is this _coming_ from?" Rarity looked around herself, but of course didn't find any actual foals in her workroom. Because I didn't make them move, or give them mouths to talk with, it took her a few minutes to realize the cries were coming from the ponyquins.

Hilariously, her first conclusion was that her ponyquins were haunted, and she tried to flee the room, which was a little difficult for her because I'd turned the door into a life-size paper photograph of a door hanging on the wall, and when she used her magic to open it, it tore into shreds. Meanwhile the ponyquins were crying for "Mommy" louder and louder. Rarity backed herself against what used to be the door, sewing needles and scissors floating in the air in front of her, ready to shred an attacker to bits. Sad, really. The baby ponyquins just wanted love from their mommy, and instead she was preparing to kill them if they came near her! What a terrible mother Rarity is.

I dangled down from the ceiling and tapped Rarity on the head. She let out a shriek and fired a bolt of magic straight up at me, which I of course dodged. "Oh my!" I said. "I hope I'm not interrupting anything..."

"DISCORD!" The _lungs_ on that mare. "What have you done?!"

"Why, what makes you think I've done anything?" I said, putting my paw over my heart. "I've just come to drop in on an old friend for a chat! I'm _shocked_ that you think I'm up to something nefarious, after all we've meant to each other!"

"All that we've _meant_ to each other? All you mean to _me_ is a hideous nuisance who's ponynapped Princess Luna!"

"How soon you forget, Rarity!" I floated down from the ceiling. "_I_ hooked you up with your last boyfriend! It's hardly my fault it didn't work out between you and Tom."

"Be_ quiet_, you ruffian!" She started throwing things at me, such as scissors, needles, etc.

"Well, now, _that's_ hardly ladylike behavior," I complained.

"You do not _deserve_ ladylike behavior, you monstrous brute!"

"And here I was thinking that ladylike behavior is inherent to the _lady_, not to her audience. Oh, how cruelly my illusions have been shattered!" I put my taloned arm to my forehead and fell backward onto her fainting couch. She took the opportunity to send her entire arsenal at me, so I turned them all into cheese puffs and funneled them all into my mouth, chomping them down. Rarity stared at me, one eye twitching.

"You... you _monstrosity!_ What have you done to my sewing supplies?"

"Oh, I ate them. They were delicious! Your hospitality is excellent as always, Rarity, thank you." I wiped my lips with the whatever-it-was she'd been making, getting cheese puff crumbs all over it.

Before her eyeballs exploded out of her head, I leaned forward. "But actually, I'm here for some information. I must confess, this Anon fellow of yours has me stymied. However did someone like _that_ win the hearts of six mares? I have a hard time imagining that you would all find him attractive."

"That simply shows how little you know," Rarity huffed. "Anon is a true gentlemen, a paladin, a knight in shining armor! Not to be confused with Twilight's brother, of course, who is quite the handsome stallion, but Anon is a _gem_, a paragon of male beauty!"

"But he isn't even a pony," I pointed out.

"I know," Rarity said dreamily. "So exotic! And the wonders he can perform with his hands!"

This, I had to admit, rather ticked me off. "_I'm_ exotic, _and_ I have hands," I said crossly. "What's Anon got that I haven't got?"

Rarity glared at me. "Symmetry."

All right, she had me there. "So what's so great about symmetry anyway?"

While I'd been having this conversation with Rarity, I'd been slowly working on her, increasing her talkativity and desire to _gift_ me with her opinions. This was actually easier than it was to do to Applejack, and didn't even require me to alter her aura much; Rarity was already a gossip who'd share her strong opinions about anyone and everything at the drop of a hat, probably after quickly dusting the hat off and complaining about how it was practically ruined now from touching the ground.

"As if you could possibly understand," Rarity sneered. "A creature like you couldn't _hope_ to understand the appeal of someone as wonderful as Anon!"

"Then tell me," I said. "_Educate_ me. If you think he's so wonderful, _surely_ you can spare a few words to explain why!"

"Gladly," she said sharply, before losing her edge to that dreamy expression again. "He's so well-mannered and so caring, such a delight to be with. Why, any mare in his embrace can't help but feel as if he'd move heaven and earth to take care of her. He's so strong, but so gentle; so sweet, but so fierce in our defense. He always has a compliment or a gift for us, and he's so considerate and loving..." She shivered, a sultry smile on her face that rather annoyed me, given that I knew how little it had to do with being in _my_ company. "And those _hands_, and the magnificent things he can do with them. So very splendid."

"And you don't mind sharing him with five other mares? How very generous of you."

"I..." Rarity flushed and looked away. "I confess it... sometimes... sometimes I feel unworthy of him, of my friends, because I can't quite live up to my ideals... I'm supposed to be the Element of Generosity, but there are times... there are times I do want him all to myself, and I resent that I must share him with my friends. What a terrible thing for me to think! Sometimes I feel like such a failure... I'm not truly generous at all, am I?"

It's so very interesting to make ponies want to babble their deepest, darkest secrets to me. I always get such intriguing tidbits out of it. "Of course not!" I said. "Feeling jealousy at having to share your lover is a perfectly natural, normal thing for a pony to feel! After all, you're not perfect; no pony could possibly be. I think it's positively wonderful of you that you can even share a lover at all, and keep any jealous feelings to yourself! No one could blame you for what goes on in the privacy of your own mind, after all."

"You really think so?" Rarity asked, by now deep enough under my spell that she'd forgotten I was her enemy Discord, Spirit of Disharmony, and had apparently mistaken me for a gal pal from the spa or something.

"Of course!" I said. "Besides, given what they've said about you - oh dear, I wasn't supposed to talk about that, was I?"

Even under my influence, Rarity's finely honed instinct for gossip about herself was as sharp as usual. "What do you mean?" she asked, glaring.

"Oh, I'm sure Applejack wouldn't have meant me to share the information," I said, talons against my lips in my best impersonation of a coy ingenue. "She only shared it with me because she's so very honest; I'm _sure_ she would prefer that I keep it in confidence."

"Did she _tell_ you not to tell me?" Rarity demanded.

"Well... not really... it never actually came up, to tell the truth," I "admitted".

"Then there's no reason you can't tell me!" she said triumphantly.

"I... suppose you're right," I said, feigning reluctance. "Well. If the truth be told, Applejack told me... something about Anon that... oh, I really shouldn't be telling you this."

"Discord, tell me _now!_" Her telekinesis grabbed my head and yanked it forward so she could glare into my eyes.

"Oh, well, if you're going to be so _forceful_ about it..." I pulled my head back. "See, Applejack was sharing some of her insecurities with me... _you_ know how honest she is..."

Rarity blinked. "Honest or not, I cannot imagine Applejack sharing insecurities with _you_," she said, overlooking the fact that she just had.

"Wellll... it might have had a teeny tiny bit to do with a spell I put on her to amplify her honesty..."

"You _brute!_"

"Oh, make up your mind, girl, one moment I'm making her a liar and I'm a brute for doing that, and then I make her _more_ willing to exemplify her Element and I'm a brute for doing that too? If anything I just made her more powerful against _me_, did you ever think of that? I mean your little lightshow only works when you're really feeling your Elements, right?"

"You... do have a point," Rarity said reluctantly. "Well, go on then, what did she tell you?"

"Well, she was saying how insecure she feels around all of you, because she feels like all of you are so much better than she is. In particular, she pointed out how much prettier than herself she feels you are, Rarity."

"Oh... but Applejack could be so beautiful if she only put some time and attention into her appearance! I'm not really all that lovely, naturally, I simply know how to make the most of what I have! Oh, I must teach Applejack some things about makeup and fashion, I'm sure I could help her to become _truly_ stunning!"

"Oh, no need, no need!" I said. "You see, Anon helped her with her feelings by telling her that she's his second favorite of all of you... next to Twilight, of course-"

"But I always thought his favorite was Fluttershy," Rarity said weakly.

"Well, there's no way to tell if Anon was lying to Applejack or not," I said. "But what he told her when she said she thought you were more beautiful than she is, was that you're his _least_ favorite pony. Something about being just like the stuck-up girls from his high school?"

Rarity was turning even paler than usual. "But... surely Anon couldn't have..."

"Of course, Applejack wouldn't have lied to me," I said, "but Anon could have been lying to _her_ to make her feel better."

"Of course," Rarity said weakly, before putting a hoof to her mouth. "Except... Applejack can tell when anypony's lying..."

"But Anon's not a pony! So perhaps he _can_ lie to her!"

Rarity was shaking her head, her face a mask of dawning horror and misery. "No... no, Applejack can tell when he's lying, too... she always knows..." She burst into tears. "_Anon doesn't love me!_" she wailed.

"Now, now, I'm sure he loves you," I said reassuringly. "Just because you're his _least_ favorite of his six marefriends doesn't mean he doesn't care about you! Just not nearly as much as he cares about any of your other friends!"

"I - I must be strong," she hiccupped, obviously trying to stop sobbing. "It's... it's his decision, not theirs... I must not be _jealous_ of my friends' good fortune..."

"Well, if they were good friends, I'm sure they'd understand," I said. "It's certainly painful to be told the one you love loves five other mares more... seven if you count Celestia and Luna."

"He loves the _princesses_ more than me?" Rarity wailed.

"Of course," I said. "They _are_ the princesses, after all. But don't worry! If you want to keep the fact that you know this from your friends so they won't think you're jealous, you needn't worry about Applejack! I put a memory spell on her when we were done with our little chat, because I didn't want her to run to Anon and tell him I was in town, so she has no recollection of our conversation at all! And as long as you don't question her on the matter and reveal that you know something, she won't have any way of guessing that you feel jealous of her!"

Rarity glared at me. "And how do I know you're telling the truth?"

I put up my paws in a gesture of surrender. "_You're_ the one who demanded I give you this information! I certainly didn't volunteer it to you, madam, and I find it quite rude of you to insinuate that I'm lying to you when you practically had to pull my fang to get me to tell you any of this!"

The anger on her face collapsed into misery again. "That's true... if you were lying you'd have just told me without my insistence... oh, why did I even _ask?_"

"Don't you think you have the right to know where you stand?" I said softly to her. "Rarity, all the world knows you're a magnificent mare. Not my type, of course... you're far too symmetrical." I grinned at her. "But for some reason you ponies do like this whole symmetry thing. By _pony_ standards, you're stunning. Surely if you feel slighted by Anon, you could do better elsewhere? Isn't it better to know the truth?"

"I... I couldn't do better than Anon," she whimpered. "I'll never find a stallion as wonderful as he is..."

"I'm sure you could," I said. "If you keep your eyes open. Which you can't do if you spend all your time gazing at Anon. There's a whole world of stallions out there, girlfriend! Go on, go out there and carpe stallionem!"

"I... but it's Anon I want..."

"Well, then you might have to compete with your friends for him. Just friendly competition, of course, you're all in a herd together. It's not as if you're going to backstab them and force them _out_ of the herd to improve your standing with Anon; after all, they're your _friends_."

"Of course I'm not..."

"That's right! It'll be much harder to win his love all to yourself without making them look really bad and ruining his love for them, of course, but that plan of action is _right_ off the table because you'd never do such a thing to your friends, even if they've all betrayed you by taking the stallion, excuse me, man that you love and making him love them more than he loves you!"

"I... I have to think about this..."

"Well, of course you do. Put as much thought into it as you need to, my dear. None of it's any skin off my nose, anyway; I don't have a mare to root for in this fight. Though I must say that anyone who'd prefer a country bumpkin like Applejack to someone as sophisticated, intelligent and artistic as _you_ are... well, honestly, I truly do think you could do better. Why, even my old friend Steve has nothing but wonderful things to say about you, and when Steve waxes ecstatic about a _female_, let alone a female pony... well, it's just amazing to me that no stallion has come along and swept you off your hooves yet."

"Steve?"

"Why, you know him, Steven Magnet! The river serpent? We're old pals!" We aren't. He expressed extreme displeasure when I changed the river water to chocolate syrup and attempted to attack me. Oh, dragonkind, always trying to posture draconically at me as if I were a mere dragon-pony hybrid and not the Lord of Chaos. And yes, water serpents are, essentially, dragons by any other name. I did know him well enough to know which direction his gate swings in, though, quite fabulously too if I'm not mistaken.

"I... but there are so few stallions, I'd have to share nearly any of them with their other wives..."

"Like Cup Cake shares Carrot?"

Rarity frowned at me, but it was an "I'm thinking" frown, not an unhappy frown. "That's true... Cup Cake doesn't share Carrot... except maybe with Pinkie but she's never said so one way or another..."

"Now surely you don't think you're less alluring than Cup Cake, do you?"

"Of course not!" She drew herself up in a posture of great offense. "I am _much_ more attractive than that... little... baker!"

"That's the spirit! You go out there and be as Rarity as you can possibly be, and _some_ stallion or other is bound to swoon at your feet! Even if you're not interested in him... you can always use him to make Anon jealous, now can't you?"

"Yes... yes, of course, I could do that..." She brightened.

"Do tell me how it all turns out, won't you? Ta-ta!"

* * *

><p>Oh, what a marvelous day that was. And since then I do believe I've seen bits and pieces of disaffection with Anon from Rarity. I was <em>hoping<em> to make her turn on her friends in jealousy, but making her fall out of love with Anon might be even better - if she starts to see him for what he is, it'll either drive a wedge between her and the rest of the Bearers, or between the Bearers and Anon, and either way will be good for me.

My next few interviews... did not go nearly so well. But I've quite exhausted myself writing about my own cleverness, Dear Reader, and since Luna's free now (that happened round about the same time as Anon chopped off my tail, and I'll get to telling you all about it, eventually), I have to be careful to get my sleep during the day. It's off to nap a bit for me, and when I get up, I'll try to finish writing about my interviews with Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy. Though maybe I won't write about my conversation with Fluttershy. Ever.


	6. In which I don't succeed at anything

I'm quite proud of myself! I've spent about half of today creating a spell to block Luna from a pony's mind. Of course I can block her for _myself_ - I have quite a bit more raw power than she does - and I could easily enough cast a chaos field around any given pony to make Luna's spell fall apart as she tries to enter their dreamscape. One thing chaos magic is _exceptionally_ good at is disrupting harmonic magic. Oh, you should have seen what those vines I was breeding a millennium ago could do to any unicorn, even one who wasn't actively trying to cast!... shame about those, they were supposed to sprout after I planted their seeds, but that was right before I was turned to stone the first time, and I suppose they needed something I wasn't around to give. Ah, well, c'est la guerre.

The problem is that if I cast a chaos field around a pony, Luna's going to know it, and she's going to know that pony is important to my plans. Also, an alicorn can superconcentrate harmonic magic to the point where if they try really hard they can break any spell of mine that I'm not actively concentrating on myself. So I'd tip Luna off that these ponies are useful to me, which is exactly _why_ I don't want her spelunking in their dreams, and in the end I wouldn't be able to keep her out of their heads anyway. Once I finish collecting my Elements of Disharmony, or some of them anyway, I'm going to be handing them out, and once I do _that_ I want the ponies who have them to be immune to Woona The Dream Spy.

Creating actual spells is not what chaos magic is particularly good at. Harmonic spells are easy, if you do that sort of thing, which I don't because _boring_. There are little routines you make a spell perform, orders you give it if you will, and if you link them together just right you get a very, very predictable spell that will do the same thing every time you cast it, unless you're Twilight Sparkle and much too powerful for your own good. (Someday Sparky's going to figure out she's a chaos caster, that she's using pure willpower to force raw magic to do her bidding and, spoiler alert, raw magic _is_ chaos magic. Entirely the wrong way to go about it. If she learned some chaos theory she'd be dangerous, but fortunately for me she has entirely the wrong mindset to be able to learn to manipulate chaos. On the other hand... just the fact that she can make raw magic do her bidding with willpower is impressive as it is. The only ponies I've ever seen pull that stunt were Starswirl, and Luna when she shouldn't have been able to do classical magic at all. But I digress!)

Chaos magic does not work the same way. As my little digression above should suggest, raw, uncontrolled magic is chaos magic, and vice versa. Change, disorder, transformation of information, is the engine that generates magic in our world, so stirring up disorder increases the available free magic in the local mana pool. This actually makes more magic available to _everyone_, not just me, but since I can actually detect ebbs and flows in the thaumosphere that ponies can't, I become aware it's there a lot sooner than unicorns do. And I can use it directly. Users of harmony magic, aka every sane unicorn ever, can't.

Think of it this way. Raw magic is waiting to do what you tell it to. But raw magic is, mmm, hyper. Raw magic is full of energy and it wants to do things with that energy. It wants to flow through you and make cacti into giant marshmallows and turn bananas into spiders and make water rain up. It comes from change and transformation, and that is what it wants to do. The act of casting a harmonic spell is the imposition of rules from the superstructure of Order, the metamagical rules that govern what you can and can't do with magic, to strip raw magic of its free will and make it do what you want, at which point, generally, it does exactly what you told it to do. Which is not necessarily what you _wanted_ it to do, but then, that's why unicorns who experiment with creating and testing spells usually have a short life span if they don't get really good at it really fast.

(There is no such thing as Order magic, by the way. Magic is chaos. Ordering chaos is harmony, not order. Order supplied the rules that magic works by; it is not in itself a form of magic.)

I don't think this is very fair to magic! The poor thaumic particles, they just want to play and have fun and reproduce by causing disorder and change to make more thaumic particles, and stuffy stick-in-the-mud unicorns strip them of their ability to do what _they_ want to do and force them to do what the unicorns decided, and I consider this a travesty! Won't anyone think of the poor thaumic particles?

Chaos magic, by contrast, is not about telling magic what to do. It's about _persuading_ magic to do what you want. Convince magic that what you want would be fun, and it will happily cooperate... losslessly. See, adding the structure of rules to harmonic magic weakens the magic. You're burning up some of it in creating the structure that the rest of it will follow. The more precise your magical operation, the less power you have (and vice versa... this is why Twilight Sparkle, the world's most powerful unicorn, cannot match her friend Rarity for precision and dexterity.) But talking magic into doing what you want it to do? That consumes nothing. All the magic you were drawing on is available for creating the effect; none of it goes into shaping the magic.

Magic is my friend. It trusts me. It knows I'll create chaos, which will make more magic. Magic knows I won't force it to do things that are no fun. Twilight Sparkle may be the Element of Magic, but that's an element of Harmony. I am Chaos, and whatever sappy things Twilight might have to say about friendship... _Chaos_ is magic. So magic does pretty much anything I want it to without my having to force it.

Thus, most of my spells are very spontaneous. Half the time I don't even know exactly what they'll do before they go off. I summon "pie"! Will it be cream pie? Cherry pie? Chicken pot pie? Snozzberry? Papier mache? Mud pie? Pinkie Pie? The circumference of a circle divided by its diameter? (Usually it's not that one. Chaos hates math, unless the math is really complicated or interesting.) But when I have to create a spell that produces a consistent effect when I'm not around to guide it... that takes work, because frankly, magic is brainless. Magic is such a hyperactive ferret it makes Pinkie and I look like stolid college professors. This is _why_ most creatures have to use harmonic magic to get anything resembling consistent effects; magic is stupid and you have to tell it what to do.

So it was a real challenge for me. I had to create a spell that would use chaos magic in a consistent way when I'm not around to tell it what to do, and it would have to perform a task much more complex than "mess up harmonic spells".

What I did was to create a spell that generates dreams. Normally it leaves dreams alone entirely; dreams are chaotic, and the chaos of dreams feeds the spell, strengthening it. When it senses dreamwalking magic - anyone's, it doesn't have to be Luna's - it sends a compulsion to the dreaming mind to relive happy childhood memories. I picked happy childhood memories because every creature that dreams has _some_ (and if their childhood was endless misery, most likely my spell will just make them make up some happy things to dream about... it's a dream, after all, it doesn't have to have actually happened). Luna won't interfere with a happy dream, and a dream about my minion's childhood will necessarily take place _before_ they became my minion and therefore include no telltale imagery of talking statues or cotton candy or my handsome face. And because the effect will produce different dreams for every pony I cast it on, every time it goes into effect, it is sufficiently chaotic that it falls within the purview of what I can use my powers for, which allows me to get away with adding just enough structure to it that it becomes a repeatable spell with consistent results that work when I'm not focused on it.

I realize I am damaging my villain cred by plotting to cast spells on my minions that give them _happy dreams of idyllic foalhood._ I know, I know, I'm supposed to be cackling "bwahaha" and giving them horrifying dreams that rend their souls and shatter their minds. _Boring!_ Also stupid. If I select ponies because they're useful to me, odds are, driving them insane will make them less useful! Otherwise wouldn't I have picked insane ponies to begin with? Besides if I'm going to shatter somepony's mind and drive them into gibbering insanity... I want to do it when they're _awake._ And I'd do it to my enemies, not my allies.

See, unlike other villains, _I_ don't take minions for granted. Most of the time, I work alone. I also really, really enjoy disharmony, which makes it close to impossible for anyone to work together. And I put a lot of value on freedom from nonsensical rules. So I don't treat minions like slaves, or servants who are honor-bound to carry out my whims; I treat them like contractors. They'll work for me as long as I'm paying them and they haven't gotten a better offer, therefore, I need to keep their working conditions fairly tolerable. Also I haven't figured out how to make anyone slavishly subservient and loyal to me without also making them fall in love with me, and if there's one thing infinitely worse than a disrespectful, wiseassed minion, it's a clingy, emotionally needy minion. (I like to think this is because I am so anti-authoritarian that I simply can't comprehend the mindset of slavishly serving anyone unless you're madly in love with them, not that I'm incompetent or something.) Other villains can growl "You have disappointed me for the last time" and kill their minions for a minor screw-up; I just tell them that they'd better get their plot in gear to fix their mistake or no Hearth's Warming bonus for them! And yet I still have far fewer minions than pretty much any other villain ever. Go figure. I guess minions don't like _nice_ villains like me; they prefer to be pushed around by flankhole villains who mistreat them.

Anyway. At the moment I don't have any minions; I still need to go collect the Elements of Rage and Greed. But first, I'm going to tell you the rest of the story of my interviews with the Elements of Harmony.

* * *

><p>When I dropped in on Pinkie, she was singing some sort of inane song about baking cupcakes, so I joined in with her.<p>

As she was singing, "Cinnamon/vanilla too/Add them to our treat/A nutmeg pinch, a dash of salt/Soon they'll be ready to eat!" I chimed in "Cutie marks/and wingies too/Add them to our treat/A griffin pinch, a dash of Dash/Soon you'll be ready to eat!"

Pinkie turned and glared at me. "Do you mind? Those lyrics are really really gross and will ruin our Y7 rating!" (No, I have no idea what she meant by that. The ways of Pinkie can be mysterious even to me.) Then she did a comic doubletake. "_DISCORD?!"_

"No, no, no, discord would be if I'd been trying to sing a completely different song," I said. "For instance, you sing your song about cupcakes, and I sing 'A peanut sat on the railroad track, his heart was all a-flutter/Round the bend came the Number 10/Toot toot, peanut butter!'"

"Mmm, peanut butter," Pinkie said dreamily. "Hey, I could add some peanut butter to the cupcakes!" She went rummaging around in the pantry to dig up a jar of peanut butter, piped some into six of the cupcake centers, and only then swung back around to face me. "What are you doing here, you big meany pants?"

"Now what did I do to deserve that?" I asked her. "I come to visit, I sing with you, I even give you ideas for your cupcakes! And yet suddenly I'm a 'big meany pants!' Where's the friendship? The harmony?"

"You, mister, are not anypony's friend!" She poked her hoof in my face. "You'd better get out of here before I call Anon to turn you into a pincushion again!"

"Oh, Pinkie, you wound me," I said. "If only you and I could have seen eye to eye..." I snapped my eyeballs out and had them hover directly in front of Pinkie's, touching them. To Pinkie's credit, she continued to glare into my now much more closely proximate eyeballs. I pulled them back to my head with a rubberband snap. "I would have made you my Queen of Chaos!" I said, slithering around her.

"I don't want to be a queen of chaos, you big meanie!"

"Ah, but think of it, Pinkie. Chocolate rain, every day!"

"You'd just forget the whipped cream, _like you did every single time!_" Pinkie shrilled in my ear.

"Not now that you've reminded me!" I made a gigantic glass, twice as tall as Pinkie herself, appear in front of us, with a cotton candy cloud raining chocolate milk into it and a giant swizzle straw bent down so Pinkie could reach it, with large dollops of whipped cream floating on top. "But that's not all. Imagine flowers that turn into cupcakes!" I handed her one. It was a pink tulip that opened to reveal a pink-frosted cupcake inside. "Playgrounds made of peppermint!" With a bit of space-bending I made a full, adult-pony-sized foals' playground appear, where the supports for the swings and the slide were peppermint sticks and the chains on the swings were licorice. "Gingerbread houses that are _edible!_" We were now standing outside of Sugarcube Corner. I broke off a piece of it, took a bite and handed her the rest. "Want some?"

She took the gingerbread and munched it. "Mm, not bad, but I think it needs more molasses," she said. "And anyway you can't eat Sugarcube Corner! I work here!"

"But you'd have no need to work here if you joined me," I said. "Everypony in Ponyville would have all the sweets they could imagine wanting, for _free!_ And you wouldn't have to do any of the work-"

"But I love baking!"

"-unless you wanted to! I could make you into an army of Pinkie Pies, able to bake up a thousand cupcakes in a night!"

"That does sound like a good idea..." Pinkie murmured, and then frowned. "Oh, wait, no, Anon told me about that. No, that's not a good idea!"

"Oh, you're so hard to please. What do you _want,_ Pinkie? Anything you can dream of, and you could have it."

"I want you to go away, Mr. Meanie!" She poked me in my nose again.

I sighed theatrically. "But _why,_ Pinkie? How can you break my heart like this?" I took my heart out of my chest to display its brittle and multi-sectioned condition to Pinkie before putting it back.

"Because my heart belongs to Anon, silly billy!"

Well, at least I had graduated from "big meanie" to "silly billy." "Why?" I asked plaintively. "How did he win your heart?"

"Because he's fun!"

"I'm fun," I pointed out.

"And he's _nice_," Pinkie said pointedly. "And goofy! And silly! And kinda wacky! And he has a lot of energy, and he gets my jokes!"

"I get your jokes..."

"And he's _friendly_, and he likes to make ponies laugh, like me, and he likes to play funny pranks, and one time! One time he got this rainbow taffy -" She pointed to a jar of paper-wrapped taffies on the counter - "all in Dashie's hair, and we had to _eat_ it to get it out of her hair!" Pinkie's expression went dreamy again. "Dashie hair... and taffy... mmm..."

"But Pinkie, he sounds exactly like me! How can you spurn me and savor him, when all the things you love about him are things I have as well?"

"Because he's _nice!_ And you're not!"

I coiled around her again. "I think we've gotten off on the wrong footing, my dear," I said. "I can be quite nice. Unfortunately, when we met... I was trying to keep you six from wielding the Elements against me, and I'm sorry to say that meant I had to attack you. But I truly regretted doing that to _you_, Pinkie. Laughter has always been special to me."

"Not falling for it," Pinkie growled. "You're just a big meanie."

Back to this? The repetition was bothering me; I had had dealings with Pinkie before, and she'd been both funnier and less mindlessly repetitive. This was Anon's doing. Anon, who she _loved_ for being _funny_. From my interactions with him I couldn't actually imagine him being humorous in the slightest, except for unintentionally.

"I mean it!" I said. "You were the only pony who appreciated any part of my chaos, and I had to destroy that to try to protect myself from the Elements. Believe me, I regret that _very_ deeply. But I meant no harm to anyone else. I gave them chocolate milk rain and fields of popcorn!"

"You made those little bunny rabbits into mutants!"

"If you'd ever been as small as a bunny rabbit, you'd appreciate getting to be taller than most of your predators for once."

"And the dancing buffalo?"

"Oh, buffalo. Such Noble Warriors, such humorless archetypes of macho bravery. Don't you know I can't put anything into anyone if it's not there to begin with? Deep within the hearts of some buffalo, I sensed a longing for grace and beauty. Am I wrong to bring it out and let them experience their heartfelt dream, just because society will judge them harshly? What's _wrong_ with being a buffalo ballerina, if that's what the buffalo secretly desires?"

Pinkie looked torn. I thought to myself that I might actually be getting somewhere with her. Then she scowled. "But you made me a mad meanie pants! I'm not really secretly angry at everypony! So you did put something in me that wasn't there!"

"Oh, Pinkie. You mean to tell me you've _never_ had an angry thought? Never been resentful that your friends don't take you seriously, that they're too busy laughing at your antics to see the true you inside?"

"I'M NOT LISTENING TO YOU! LA LA LA LA!"

"You've _never_ had the slightest resentment that they don't understand you? That they treat you as some sort of freak?"

She pulled out cymbals from her mane and started clanging them. But two could play at that game. I snapped up a pair of black anti-cymbals and clanged them in time with hers. The anti-cymbals produced a sonic wave form designed to be precisely the opposite of Pinkie's cymbals, thus canceling out the sound entirely. A bit more heavily ordered than I like my tricks to be, but it works on a principle of pure disharmony, so it's good enough.

However, it's really unpleasant to listen to if it's not canceling another sound out. On the last cymbal crash, Pinkie faked me out, and at the last moment did _not_ clang her cymbals. I winced as the sound of a cymbal's exact opposite rang out through the air. She smirked at me as if she'd just won something. "You're not gonna get me this time, Discord. I know better than to listen to you!"

"Yes, but if you'd-"

"LAAAAAAAAAAA!"

Oh, the lungs on that mare. She meant it, too. She had decided she wasn't going to listen to me, and she was going to make silly noises to enforce it. For a moment I thought of taking her mouth... but what good would that do me? I was here to get her to tell me about Anon, not _really_ to convince her that she would be better off leaving him and joining me in creating chaos... right?

Oh digitize me and put me in an array. I realized I had lost track of my true mission... because I was angry that he'd taken Pinkie. Not that she, personally, had ever been mine... but while I'll let Harmony's claim to Magic stand on the grounds that it's harmonic magic that the Element wields, Laughter should _never_ have been Harmony's. It's _mine._ Laughter depends on chaos. And Pinkie was one of the rare ponies who was actually a chaos wielder. If Pinkie had to be my enemy, she should at least have been an enemy who could sympathize with me and who fought me for her friends' sake, not out of personal hatred. She should have been the Talia al Ghul to my Batman, the Rogue to my Magneto. (It suddenly occurs to me that you ponies have no idea what I'm talking about. Why do your comics have so very few examples of heroes and villains separated only by the ties of friendship or family, and loyalty?) I'd been trying to seduce Pinkie - not sexually, though I certainly wouldn't throw her out of bed for eating cupcakes, but I'd sincerely been trying to convince her to come over to the chaos side of the Force. And as long as Anon was around, that was simply not possible.

I sighed. I could amplify Pinkie's desire for fun and laughter, but she was so resistant to me right now, she was halfway to discording _herself _into a state of wholly unwarranted rage, simply because I was the one trying to coax her to embrace her fun-loving side and her sense of compassion and forgiveness. Perhaps I could take advantage of that, lean on her harder to make her turn herself into a ball of oversensitivity and rage and then let her go take it out on her friends, or Anon... but I hadn't the heart for it. What I'd said to her hadn't been a lie - I _had_ regretted destroying Laughter. And while the whole Queen of Chaos thing had been a joke intended to open her up to telling me about Anon... it hadn't been without a grain of truth to it, either.

But right now she wasn't funny and she wasn't fun. She was just annoying, and it was his fault.

Her mind wasn't open to me, so I brute-forced my way in to erase the last ten minutes or so of her memories. I hadn't gotten _anything_ I wanted from this encounter.

* * *

><p>I suppose I need to tell you all about my dealings with Fluttershy, embarrassing as the story is. Who knows <em>what<em> information might turn out to be critical in defeating Anon, if I fail?

I always underestimate that little yellow pony. I wish I could chalk that up to Anon making me stupid, but I'm fairly certain I was more or less in my right mind when I went to her. I thought that getting the information I was looking for out of her would be easy, and that breaking her emotionally would also be easy. I wasn't expecting to turn her jealous, like I did Rarity; no, my intention for Fluttershy was to make her feel unworthy of Anon, and push her into turning him away out of a feeling that she doesn't deserve him. Failing that, if I could rile up some feelings of jealousy or anger, I was certain I could tie those in to Anon's actual, demonstrated behavior, which let us not forget had involved attempting to kill me with his sword (and cutting off my tail, but that hadn't happened yet), and convince her that he was cruel and violent and mean to animals (I am, technically, quite a few animals.)

This is... not how it worked out.

* * *

><p>The first time I encountered Fluttershy in person... well, the <em>very<em> first time, I was actually behind a stained glass window, so I'm not even sure that counts as "in person". I was free, but offset dimensionally - I was too weak to feel confident of taking on Celestia at her full power right then. I needed to wait for the chaos I'd started to snowball. And little Fluttershy had flinched away from my _image_, without even knowing that I was really behind it. Possibly this is part of why I underestimated her... the first time.

The second time, in the maze, she shocked me (and frustrated me like you can't _believe_) when she actually resisted me. Hard as I tried, I couldn't persuade her to open the door to my corruption. So I had to kick it in, so to speak, and unbalance her by force.

The next time I had one-on-one time with her, in the afore-discussed second go-round in the maze, she tried to use her Stare on me, and demanded that I release her friends. I pretended to be cowed by her, pleading with her not to use her disapproving eyeballs, before breaking down in hysterical laughter and telling her I just couldn't take how funny she was. And when I saw her face fall, when I sensed the disharmonious energies of disappointment, fear and rage sweep over her, I struck, using that moment of weakness to force the door open again and turn her cruel.

This time, I'd decided, I wouldn't cheat. I wouldn't use brute force, I wouldn't even _try_ making her cruel - it wasn't my goal, after all. If I could get her to open a door, I would amplify her, so she'd perceive Anon's behavior toward _me_ as cruel, or I'd turn up her natural negative feelings. Making a pony's dark side, the negative impulses they fight all the time, come to the foreground was actually easier than completely inverting them, just not as much fun.

She was outdoors, feeding an incredible assortment of unruly and unpleasant-smelling small animals, when I dropped in on her and gave her pets wings, and a compulsion to fly. It was hilarious watching them flit around incompetently (I didn't magically grant them knowledge of _how_ to fly, just the overwhelming desire to attempt it), while Fluttershy, only slightly more competently, flew around eeping and whimpering and pleading with them to slow down and let her catch them and oh no you're going to hurt yourself and so on and so forth.

Eventually she managed to catch them all, panting, and had personally chastised each one for attempting to fly without knowing how to avoid crashing. Much as I love chaos, I knew that if I let them get off the ground again I wouldn't actually have any opportunity to talk to Fluttershy, because she'd be entirely occupied with the status of her flying pets, so I snapped the wings away and slithered down the nearest tree, clapping. "Bravo! Bravo! An excellent piece of animal wrangling there, my dear!"

I expected her to eep and back away from me. She did flinch, but then looked up at me resolutely. "Discord, that wasn't very nice," she said, a slight tremor in her voice but no other evidence that she was frightened of me. "One of my animal friends could have seriously gotten hurt!"

"Oh, relax." I teleported over to her and stretched around her, with my tail on one side of her and the rest of me circling her, my face even with hers. "I wouldn't have let anything happen to your cutesy-wutesy pettie-wetties!" I pinched her cheek with my furred fingers, claws retracted - I wasn't trying to hurt her, just annoy her. "You're just so _adorable_ when you think you can tell me what to do!"

She tilted her head down, mane falling over the side of her face that I'd pinched, as she pulled away. "Um, please don't do that..."

"But you're just so squeezeable!" I picked her up and pulled her to my chest, squeezing her in a mock hug. "How am I supposed to resist?"

She winced again. "This really isn't very comfortable..."

"I bet you'd have no problem with it if _Anon_ was squeezing you," I said, peering down at her upside down.

"It's, um, called hugging, if you're not doing it to be mean, and Anon would let me go if I asked him," she said.

"But you haven't even asked me!"

"That's true... I said I was uncomfortable, though, so Anon would have let me go already. So would you please let me go? Or... at least don't squeeze quite so hard? I mean... if you really need to hug a pony I'm okay with being hugged, I guess, but this sort of hurts a little bit..."

I put her down hurriedly. I wasn't particularly fond of being seen as someone who _needed_ to hug a pony, as if I were desperate for affection or something. "Oh, if you insist. But tell me more about this Anon! I've only met him the once, and we didn't exactly get off on the right foot, but you girls seem to think he's positively the bee's knees."

"Oh, he is," she said dreamily. "He's so sweet and gentle and kind..."

I manifested a glass of pineapple juice just so I could do a spit-take. "_Kind?_ Are we talking about the same creature here?"

"Um... I think so, unless you're talking about someone else named Anon?"

I glared down at her. "Madam, that _lout_ is _anything_ but kind. Did you not see how he _murdered_ all those changelings? Or did you possibly fail to notice how he attacked me with a sword and tried to _cut my throat?_"

She bowed her head. "It's true... I wish he hadn't done those things. It's... I don't think it's the right way to solve problems, using so much violence like that. Especially not killing." She looked up at me again. "But you have to understand, he's the Element of Protection. He just... gets very upset when his friends are in danger. He's not normally like that. If you're his friend, he's very, very kind to you, but if you hurt his friends..."

"Then he terminates you with extreme prejudice?"

"He's a human," Fluttershy said. "They're obligate omnivores, and dependent on predation for part of their diet unless they're very, very careful to eat the right mix of vegetables, and there's no one place on their homeworld where all the vegetables they need grow naturally. I have to feed him fish, like I feed my bear friends. So they're naturally more violent than ponies, just like griffins and dragons and Diamond Dogs are. Anon's better at killing and violence than ponies are... but he uses that ability to protect us. So he _is_ kind."

I stared down at the little yellow pony, trying not to let fury overwhelm me. A creature who kills for food and to "protect" others is a hero, and _I'm_ a villain? I remember a winter of my childhood, before I'd come into much of my power, when I'd nearly starved to death because I'd refused to kill to eat. Oh, yes, darling Fluttershy, I know all about being an obligate omnivore, and yet I have managed to never murder anything for my dinner in twenty-five hundred years of existence (approximately... I've done a lot of world-walking, so I really have no clear idea how old I am, but it's somewhere around that). I've eaten meat that others have killed when I had no other choice, and once or twice when I was truly desperate I may have granted a mercy killing to a creature that another predator had fatally wounded, and then eaten it, and of course since coming into my full power I've been able to conjure meat for myself without having to kill anything for it... but I have no sympathy whatsoever for the argument that any creature _needs_ to be violent because it's biologically a predator. _I'm_ biologically a predator, and I spend most of my time eating dairy products and sugar.

Well, okay, I eat crabs sometimes, but they're really really stupid. And occasionally spiders, because it's funny, and spiders have no sense of humor. But this animal that Fluttershy is making justifications for has almost certainly eaten _cows_. Cows on the human world don't talk, but neither do any of Fluttershy's animal friends. She's the last pony I'd have thought would make excuses for an omnivore predator.

I didn't say any of that, because being visibly offended isn't funny, but I went for the jugular, perhaps prematurely. "Oh, well, perhaps that explains it," I said, sighing. "I was wondering how Anon could say such terrible things about any of his friends, and I'd wondered if Pinkie misunderstood somehow..."

"What do you mean?"

"Ah, well, I'm _sure_ Pinkie didn't mean anything by it. You know how she babbles sometimes!"

"It's okay, you can tell me," Fluttershy said. "I won't be offended."

_That's what you think_, I snickered to myself. "Well, I was having a little chat with her about Anon, just like we're doing now, and I asked her what Anon thought of the rest of you girls. You know, just making small talk. And she told me that he'd told _her_ that you were a... well..." Large blue eyes blinked up at me. "I believe the words she quoted to me were 'pathetic wuss'?"

I expected some sort of declaration that Anon would never say such a thing, or to see tears well up in those baby blues. I never for a moment expected Fluttershy to nod. "I'm sure he does," she said. "Just like I wish he could be kinder sometimes, even when he goes into battle... I'm sure he wishes I could be tougher."

"Wait a minute. The fellow you supposedly love calls you a 'pathetic wuss', and all you do is _agree_ with him?"

"All pathetic really means is that you feel sorry for somepony," Fluttershy said in that completely annoying, quiet, calm voice of hers. "I'm sure Anon does feel sorry for me because it's hard for me to stand up for myself. I did try to be less of a doormat one time, but I didn't like who it turned me into, and Anon knows that. So it must be hard for him, knowing that I could be stronger and tougher and I choose not to be, but that's not who I am. And I know he accepts who I am, even if some parts of me frustrate him."

Some parts of her were certainly frustrating _me._ "I can't believe you'll just roll over for an insult like that, from your supposed love!" I ranted at her. "Don't you have any self-respect at _all_?"

"Not really," Fluttershy said, while I attempted to not let my jaw actually fall off my face. "I mean, I do know that I'm worthy of respect, in my mind, but in my heart... well, I've been fighting these feelings all my life, really. Some part of me feels like I'm worthless, and that little part of me always feels sad and always wants to hide away from the world, so it's been very hard for me." I hadn't even unbalanced her to make her more honest or forthcoming. She was just _telling_ me these things. "I think I do a pretty good job of hiding it most of the time, though. Don't you think so? I mean, you'd be the expert..."

I was discombobulated enough to fall for that. "What do you mean, I'd be the expert?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, but it's just obvious to me. You're hiding it too, aren't you? Every time you're near ponies you want attention, but you spend most of your time alone. You don't seem to have any friends, either. Maybe you had some once and you lost them? Or maybe you never did have any? But I can tell you must feel very lonely and isolated, and it must hurt a lot. You do a very good job of hiding it, though! I think you must be much better at hiding it than I am, so that's why I say you must be an expert."

"I don't have low self-esteem!" I raged at her. "I have _tremendous_ respect for myself! If ponies have a problem with me, that's their problem, not mine. I have a perfectly healthy ego, thank you very much! What, do you seriously think that because _ponies_ despise me that's going to affect my feelings about myself in the slightest? Why should I care what ponies think?"

"But you do," she said. "Because if you didn't, you could go create chaos someplace else, somewhere that there are no ponies, and no Elements of Harmony, and you'd be safe. You must want to be with ponies, and care about what they think of you, at least to some extent. I know you feel like it's ponies' problem and not yours, but at the same time... it must really not feel good to need something to survive that everypony is afraid of, I think."

"What are you talking about?"

"Your chaos." She put a hoof on my chest. "You're the spirit of chaos. You can't live without it. But ponies are afraid of chaos, and they hate it, and that must make you very sad deep down inside. It's like... manticores need to eat meat. They don't have a choice about it, they're carnivores. Nopony wants to have a manticore for a pet or be friends with one because they _have_ to kill to live. And not just little things like fish; they kill rabbits and squirrels and even big animals that talk... even ponies, sometimes. So everypony's afraid of a manticore, but the manticore doesn't want to be mean or cruel; it just wants to live, and what it needs to live is the death of other things."

"That's where your analogy breaks down, my dear," I said with my best snide tone. "Chaos doesn't _have_ to hurt or kill ponies. Yes, I need chaos... but so do all of you, you just don't realize it. I have _never_ used chaos to kill ponies unless they were actively trying to kill me at the time, and even then not in two thousand years. So ponies have no reason to be so afraid! It's _your_ problem, not mine!"

"But it is your problem, because it hurts you. You feel like chaos is wonderful, and you want to share it, but nopony wants it, and that hurts. Just now, when you're telling me that chaos doesn't have to hurt ponies? You want ponies to like chaos, I can hear it in your voice." She turned her back on me and took a step away, then looked back. "But... part of the reason they don't is that you do mean things with it, Discord. You made my animals fly around when they didn't know how to fly, and they could have gotten hurt. You made Granny Smith want to dance, and she was laid up in bed for nearly a month after that with her back hips thrown out because she's too old and fragile to dance the way you made her want to. You embarrassed poor Plains Thunder so much he tried to leave his tribe and go off into the desert by himself because several of his tribe saw him ballet dancing. You didn't ask _anypony_ if they wanted to do the things you made them want to do, or if it would be a problem for them if you did it. If you want ponies to learn to love chaos, you need to show them that it doesn't have to hurt them. So far all you've done is embarrass or frighten ponies or break their hearts and make them miserable. If chaos doesn't have to hurt ponies, it's up to you to prove that."

"This is ridiculous!" I teleported in front of her, since it seemed as if she was preparing to walk away from me, as if she were in control of this interview. "You think you know everything about me. You know _nothing_, little pony!"

"I know when a creature is hurting," she said. "And you're a creature, just like a pony, just like a rabbit. I would try to help you with that, if you would be okay with it, but... I don't think you're ready to ask for help yet. Because you'd have to stop being mean to everypony and just doing anything you want anytime you want, and I don't think you're ready to give that up, and that's why we have to fight you... also you still have Princess Luna hidden someplace, and the Elements. But I really don't want to fight you, Discord. I will if I have to... but I'd rather be kind to you, if you would let me." She smiled up at me. "Maybe that makes me a pathetic wuss, but I'd rather be a pathetic me than a strong, tough pony who isn't really me at all."

I growled in frustration and reached out to her with a claw. That made her shrink back, showing fear for the first time. "Are you going to discord me?" she asked. "Please don't, I hate being mean..."

"Oh, for the love of... I refuse to be that predictable. No, I am _not_ going to 'discord' you, I've done that twice now and it does me no good whatsoever. I'm erasing your memory of this conversation."

"I don't think you're going to do that."

"Why not?" I snickered at her. "Am I supposed to be afraid of your disapproving eyeballs again?"

"You shouldn't do it because it's wrong and it's mean. I don't want to lose my memories. But I know that right now you don't care about that."

"And I suppose you have a reason I _do_ care about?" I said in a bored tone, blowing on my fingers.

"Yes, I think so," she said, and looked up at me. "You don't really want to. You're scared of a pony understanding you because you're afraid I might use it against you somehow... but you like the fact that I care enough to _try_ to understand, and part of you hopes that I could understand you, that maybe you wouldn't have to be completely alone and there would be at least one pony who could feel sympathy for you. If you take my memories away... you'll be totally alone again."

She was looking up at me, her eyes fixed on mine, and I couldn't pull mine away. There was no anger or fear in them, no demands. When she'd used her Stare on me before, it was anger and dominance and the imposition of will, and of course I'd laughed at her, because who can dominate chaos? I pour anger onto my breakfast cereal and eat it with milk. No one dominates me, no one controls me, nopony's anger at me can ever bother me or cow me.

This was worse. I saw Celestia in her eyes, confident that I could control my power, that I wouldn't hurt her, from back in the time when I'd have rather died than cause her pain. I saw her father, the last time I'd seen him, when he'd asked me to protect his daughters if he didn't return - and he didn't, and I had, at least until Celestia got stupid and trusted when she should have known better, and Luna and I _had_ known better but we didn't stop her because we wanted to believe, too. I saw Luna, squealing with delight and exhilaration rather than fear as she fell, because she believed I would catch her, and I had.

I saw my mother, urging me on, promising that if I kept going despite my exhaustion that we could have a real bed in a real house for once, certain that I could make it if I wanted to, and I had.

I'd betrayed them all, though only Celestia and Luna had lived to know it. I wasn't a good draconequus. I wasn't a protector. I wasn't the best me I could be, the me they had believed in at those moments, and yet here was this pegasus who had no reason whatsoever to trust me and her eyes was so calm and certain. She believed I'd do as she asked. She believed I'd be good.

_How wrong you are_, I thought, and I tried to reach out again, to kick open the door and take her recent memories, but I couldn't. Those blue eyes paralyzed me. A small part of me realized she'd found a way to make her Stare work on me. I laughed at the anger of ponies... but I cringed at their trust, because I'd broken it so often, and I didn't even _want_ her to trust me, I wanted her to think I was the villain, I wanted to shatter her belief and make her suffer... but damn her, she was right. She'd said the first kind words to me I'd heard from a pony in centuries, the first indication that any pony anywhere could see me as something other than a sealed evil in a can unsealed, something other than a demon of pure evil.

I _couldn't_ erase that.

And she'd known I couldn't, not after she pointed it out. Damn that stupid little pony and her stupid eyes that see too much and her stupid belief and her stupid kindness.

I snarled in frustration and teleported away, leaving her memories intact.

* * *

><p><em>Notes: Pinkie's song is just a cupcake recipe adapted to be song lyrics; it can have any tune you think fits it. Discord's parody of it is of course referencing the infamous "Cupcakes". His second song, about the peanut butter, comes from the Spock vs. Q audiobook, where John de Lancie actually sings this.<em>


	7. Not A Letter To Hostler

_Potential trigger warnings: This chapter contains dubcon and discussion of rape. _

* * *

><p>Well, dear readers, something extremely strange has just happened, and I'm not entirely certain how I feel about it. You see, I went down to Baltimare to reclaim my Element of Rage from the Kraken in Mareland Bay, and... well, under the circumstances I'm not sure the phrase "I got lucky" is actually entirely apropos, so let's be a trifle blunter.<p>

Your Humble Narrator just got laid.

No, no, this isn't turning into _Letters to Hostler_. (I prefer Playcolt anyway. Although I assure you I only read it for the articles.) I promise you this is relevant. While I haven't seen a lot of action down south since breaking loose, either time, and obviously being a statue puts a serious damper on one's sexytime fun, I'm not the sort of draconequus who feels the need to share his exploits with the entire world. Believe it or not, I actually like my privacy in that regard. But this is in fact an example of the horrors Anon has inflicted on the world, which I suspect is why I feel so ambivalent about it. On the one hand, I must admit I enjoyed myself; on the other hand, I'm well aware that if I hadn't been _me_, if I actually had been the unicorn stallion I was impersonating... well, I suspect I wouldn't have had nearly as much fun.

You see, reclaiming my Element of Rage from the Kraken in Mareland Bay was actually very anticlimactic. I was expecting some sort of epic battle, some opportunity to make it rain exploding cream pies underwater, but the moment the Kraken saw me, he swam off in a giant cloud of ink, leaving all his stuff behind. I drew smiley faces on some of his ancient relics and animated a chest of gems to nag him like a housewife, but with him absent I couldn't do most of the marvelous things I'd planned. So I picked up my Element, teleported it home, and decided to explore the city. I'm still having fun learning all about what the world's become while I was stuck in stone, after all, and I feel obligated to gather as much information about what Anon's done to the place as I can.

So I took the form of a unicorn, a gray fellow with a tornado cutie mark, and went into Baltimare to get a bite to eat. As I mentioned yesterday, I do like to eat crabs occasionally, because they're too stupid to have any fun with otherwise, and Baltimare's famous for them. I left the extremely touristy Inner Harbor and went searching for a crab shack someplace along the waterfront, and found myself in the oh-so-hipster and entirely misnamed region of Foals' Point. (I am assured that the name actually has little to do with foals, or only tangentially anyway; an earth mare by the name of Foals Plenty built a massive home on the waterfront for herself and her twenty-seven children, who then grew up and spread out throughout the area. Depending on who you talk to, Foals' Point is either named after Foals Plenty herself, or named for the truly inordinate number of children and grandchildren she had running around the place.) Foals' Point is now the sort of place where the artists who think Canterlot is too bourgeois and Manehattan is too commercial congregate to eke out a meager living selling to their fellows, and if a trend becomes trendy, it's already passe for the forward-looking ponies of Foals' Point. In other words, a place where ponies create, and demand from each other, constant change and variation in their furniture, their art, their clothing and their food. My kind of place, inasmuch as anything ponies ever create is.

I was looking for a crab shack, but I found something different. Literally. The name of the restaurant was "Something Different" and their shtick was that their menu changes every day. Though they do make a nod to commercial viability in that they have crabs all the time, during the appropriate season. The place was owned by a middle-aged earth stallion with a delightfully incomprehensible cutie mark, a circle of gradient rainbow shading that he assured me represented constant change within defined parameters. Perhaps I'll steal it for my next pony form. My waitress, a light blue unicorn with a golden beehive hairdo, wore roller skates as she served me crabs, peach nectar, and linguine in mint alfredo sauce with pine nuts. She informed me, at length, that she was single, that her fellow waitresses were also single, that the proprietor had a herd of mares his own age and no interest in his employees, and that this was a subject of distress to her. I made up girlfriends, a white unicorn and a dark blue pegasus in Canterlot who were sisters and worked at the Palace, to dissuade her from her obvious intentions. (I'm _sure_ Celestia and Luna wouldn't mind being anonymized and used as part of my cover story.)

When I'd paid my bill, she brought me out another drink, compliments of the house, she said. This one was a hard pink lemonade, which was something of a novelty for me - in my day nopony thought of making lemonade alcoholic. Now, generally speaking I don't drink alcohol, because I enjoy the natural chaos of my thought processes and don't find that consuming something which dulls my senses actually improves my experience much. I like the effect the stuff has on ponies, but unlike ponies, I'm already uninhibited. I decided that this time I'd make a partial exception, to experience the flavor, and turn it non-alcoholic after I'd already drunk it... and discovered when I did so that there was a strong sedative in it, and another potion I didn't recognize. Maybe two.

This intrigued me. Why was this waitress drugging an ordinary unicorn customer off the street? Did she have some notion of who I was? Had I fallen in with an organized crime ring? Was she planning on selling me for body parts? I decided to pretend the drug had taken effect, to see what she would do.

Now, under most circumstances, potions intended for ponies don't work on me. Unless they don't use harmonic magic, which I tend to disrupt simply by existing, _and_ they work on virtually every vertebrate species, it's very unlikely that they'll have the same effect on me as on a pony, since quite aside from being the avatar of chaos I'm also a completely different species. But when I'm impersonating a pony, I can... how to put this... I can model pony biology when I'm in pony form, so that I can feel the effects of potions that would normally work on a pony, but override those effects if I decide I don't like them. There are certain exceptions - nothing that will shut down pony magic will work on me because my magic works on different principles, for instance - but generally that's how it works.

So I let the effects of the potions through, while blocking the alcohol (alcohol, by the way, _does_ work on every vertebrate species in more or less the same ways, and most certainly does not rely on harmonic magic, so it would affect me in the same way as it would a pony if I didn't know how to block it.) What I found was that they caused dizziness and an overwhelming need to use the bathroom. I let both of those sensations continue, mostly for the novelty of it; I can count on the fingers of one paw the number of times I've felt dizzy since coming into my full power, and jokes about the chaotic destruction of bathrooms aside, I don't normally bother with the more revolting parts of biological existence. I eat because I like to eat, and I sleep because apparently my brain needs me to, but normally I use my power to avoid needing to use a bathroom unless there's a particularly funny joke or pointed commentary to make by doing otherwise, which makes the feeling of actually having to go unusual for me, and I relish unusual sensations.

After I was done with my business in the bathroom and was washing up, I felt the dizziness increase drastically. The potion was attempting to put me to sleep. _That_, I blocked. I fell to the floor and feigned unconsciousness, waiting to see what would happen.

The waitress came into the stallions' room through a separate door, presumably a cleaner's access, and levitated me onto her back. She then carried me down a set of particularly rickety and broken stairs, which would almost certainly have been entirely unsafe for the earth pony proprietor, by levitating temporary steps into place over the broken ones. Around this time I began to feel twinges similar to, but at the same time very different from, the previous need to use a urinal, and I started to have some sense of what might be going on here.

She'd dosed me with an aphrodisiac.

I'd be lying if I claimed the idea wasn't, mmm, exciting in and of itself... but I was also deeply curious. This was not normal behavior for an Equestrian. There are places in the world, and certainly there are other worlds, where this behavior might not be so very unusual for a pony, but Equestria is not one of them.

I continued to feign unconsciousness while she brought me into the basement, dropped me on a simple wooden bed with a somewhat uncomfortable hay-filled mattress, tied my legs to the four legs of the bed, and put a magic-blocking ring on my horn. This didn't actually do anything to block my magic because I'm not really a unicorn, but since she didn't know that, I was getting the distinct impression that her intentions for me were not particularly friendly.

Now this whole thing was quite a novel experience for me. I'll admit there have been times, during my adventures in world-walking, where I've found myself low on magic and in the custody of a local potentate with more puissance, at that moment, than I'd have been able to muster up, when I've found it convenient to engage in romantic activities I'd have otherwise have been uninclined toward. When you're trying to stall for time until you can build up enough magic to get home, and someone more powerful than you are at the moment finds you to be an exotic attraction to add to their collection of unusual bedwarmers, you don't say no. Well, unless their particular fetish is biting off your head and laying their eggs in your corpse, but as long as that's not on the table, you don't say no.

These experiences weren't always the most pleasant, given that they were aimed at the goal of pleasing someone else and not my personal enjoyment, but when most of the creatures you might potentially find attractive either turn up their nose at you or run away screaming because most ponies have no taste whatsoever, it turns out that being wanted that badly is an exciting sensation in and of itself. Besides, I'd be a poor excuse for an avatar of chaos if I wasn't able to rapidly adapt to the unexpected.

At other times, I've engaged in a bit of role-playing with a willing partner, or a few such. When you're virtually all-powerful, the fantasy of having control taken from you can be an intriguing one. But the thing about a role-playing fantasy conducted with consenting partners is that everyone involved knows it's a fantasy, and knows where the power _really_ resides. And when I've actually had less control over the circumstances than I might have liked, as mentioned above, my enthusiastic cooperation, whether real or feigned, has usually been enough to keep me out of any sort of restraints, or at least, any sort of restraints I couldn't easily slip out of.

So I'd actually never ended up a "prisoner" of someone who sincerely believed me to be a helpless victim, while in reality retaining all of my power. I was enormously curious as to how far she'd go with this. Also, well, it had been a while since I'd actually been with a partner. Over a thousand years, honestly. Just because I have access to full-tactile illusions that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing doesn't mean I don't relish the unpredictability of a partner who _isn't_ a puppet I'm running with my powers. And it turns out that the fantasy of having no control is improved when the other party sincerely believes that to be the case.

But the fantasy would have been utterly ruined if I hadn't played the part, and besides, as I said, I was curious. Would an Equestrian pony from the home of love, friendship and harmony really do what it looked like she was planning to do? So when she woke me up, I stayed in character. As enjoyable as this was for Discord, Lord of Chaos, I was quite certain that Twister, ordinary unicorn stallion, would have had a different opinion, and I played my role to the fullest. I threatened, demanded, struggled, pleaded, and even blushed quite prettily with feigned humiliation when she made rather stereotypical remarks about the miscongruence between my verbal and my physical reactions, along the nature of "Your lips say no, no, but your heart says yes, yes" (it was much cruder than that, and made reference to bodily parts far less unisex than the heart, but you get the idea.)

Then after she was done having her wicked way with me, her _friends_ showed up. Apparently I'd arrived near the shift change for the waitresses. I'm _really_ trying to avoid letting this turn into an unrealistic-sounding pornographic fantasy, so let's just say a fun time was had by all, though I did my best to make them believe I wasn't included amongst the ranks of fun-havers there, except possibly in the purely biological sense.

After they were all satisfied, and they began discussing what sort of memory erasure spell the ringleader was going to use on me (there was another unicorn in the group, plus one earth pony and one pegasus, but apparently my original kidnapper was the most magically adept of the bunch), I expressed disappointment that the experience was over, snapped my bonds off, reverted to my true form, and delighted in their looks of utter horror. You have _never_ seen four mares flee as rapidly and desperately as those four did. And none of them were even willing to give me an address for a thank you card or a place to come calling with a future invitation! Mares today, they're so uncouth.

But of course that's exactly the problem.

You see, given that I am the spirit of disharmony and I have a fairly good ability to detect events which generate it, particularly when I'm trapped in stone and have little else I can perceive, and given _how_ much disharmony the act of rape wreaks on the majority of its victims... I know exactly how common rape used to be in Equestria. Which is to say, not common at all. There were maybe ten rapists a year, and usually _all_ of them involved a romantic partner deciding that they were unpleased at the slowness of their courtship and doing something unpleasant to correct the situation in their favor. In the rare years when a stranger rapist might be operating, he (stranger rapists were usually stallions) might claim three or four victims in one year before getting caught, at which point the Royal Guard would often have to be called out to keep the locals from lynching him, and he'd end up in a Canterlot dungeon for the rest of his life. The ones of both genders who'd misuse their own lovers might do so for a more extended period of time, given that the Equestrian drive toward harmony tends to lead such things to get swept under rugs, but generally the truth would out eventually and the guilty party would be punished or forcibly "reformed" by spell.

The type of event I'd just been through, where a group imprisons, restrains, and gang-rapes a stranger, _never happens in Equestria._ Well, never say never, but outside of wartime, it might have happened once or twice a century during my millennium of imprisonment, and it inevitably resulted in the perpetrators being caught. Even during my reign, when I regret to say that crime in general was significantly higher than during Celestia's spell-backed rule of enforced harmony - the price one pays for freedom is inevitably that some misuse it - rape wasn't overly common. I have no numbers for that time period because I was at war with math in those days, but my gut feeling is that there might have been a tenfold increase during my period of unrule - a hundred ponies or so a year might have gotten it into their heads to decide that no meant yes rather than ten - which is still not a lot by the standards of other nations and other worlds I've visited. Equestrian ponies just don't tend to think that sex is something they're entitled to because they want it, or because they're more powerful, or whatever. _Murder_ is more common than rape most years (mainly because it's a lot easier to murder a fellow pony in a sudden and immediately regretted burst of rage than it is to suddenly commit rape.)

And yet my assailants had behaved as if they were practiced at this. Which meant that, since I'd gotten out of stone, the gang rape of strangers had gone from something that happened twice a century and was immediately caught and punished to something that was common enough that I could accidentally walk into it during one of my few excursions into pony society, and unpunished enough that the same group, operating out of a _restaurant_, could ravish more than one victim.

So, out of curiosity, I tried going to the police with my complaint. I was laughed at. And informed that mares can't rape stallions. Given that in several of the cases of ongoing marital rape that I mentioned above, the perpetrator was a mare and her victim was her husband, this had not previously been the general opinion of Equestrian jurisprudence.

I've visited the human homeworld enough to know that there, rapes are extraordinarily common, stranger rapes are greatly feared even though they're relatively rare in comparison to acquaintance rape, gang rapes are far from unheard of, and the vast majority of rape involves males victimizing females, despite which neither males _nor_ females can typically get justice, because it's assumed that males can't be raped by females and that any male who'd commit rape is a demonic monster easily detectable for what he is and so any female claiming that an ordinary, friendly-looking fellow raped her has to be lying. I knew exactly who had imported stranger rape into Equestria, and who was influencing the legal system to ignore it to such an extent that gang rapists could victimize _customers of the restaurant they worked at_ without getting caught (memory spells are far from perfect; even mine can only erase the last twenty minutes or so before they turn seriously erratic, and unicorn memory spells are worse. One of their victims has almost certainly remembered _something_, and yet they're still operating.)

Human power fantasies are unbelievably irritating. Human sexual fantasies can be downright _horrifying._

One might think I'd be happy with this circumstance. Rape is pretty much concentrated, packaged disharmony, rather like a bite-sized, single serving war in a package, and unlike war, it leaves the majority of its victims alive. But... it's just so _jejune_. While it's rare in Equestria, it's not nearly so rare in other nations, and it's just such an easy, predictable means of breaking a victim. I believe the terms the video gamers use is a "cheese move"? Those who engage in it because they want sex are just proving themselves to be pathetic losers that nopony actually wants; those who engage in it because they want to prove their power over somepony or harm them emotionally have no creativity and are generally massively insecure about their own power. It's dull and predictable and more than a little bit disgusting. _War_ has more creativity and strategy to it, and I don't like war because the end result is generally quite a lot of death, and I don't find death entertaining.

So here I am back at the Chaos Cave (Grotto of Disharmony? Oh, decisions, decisions), and I'll confess, this entire incident has left me somewhat troubled. I feel as if I ought to be pleased, because on a personal level there are no downsides to this.

My enemy has just ensured an even greater supply of energy for me. As the chaos avatar, I have the ability to manipulate raw magic, which is generated by change and transformation, as I mentioned above; but disharmony is special to me. The emotions of sentient beings produce their own magic, in and of themselves; what's commonly called "dark magic" is magic fueled by what are normally thought of as negative emotions - hatred, fear, anger. Changelings draw energy from the emotion of love - as does Princess Pinkness, but changelings drain individuals, whereas Cadance draws from either individuals or the overall available pool of love in the local thaumosphere. Well, I do the same with disharmony. Conflict, strife, dissent, my namesake, these things feed me directly in a way that even chaos doesn't; chaos stirs up raw magic that anyone can use, and I'm better at using it than they are, but disharmony specifically feeds _me_. I could live without it, unlike changelings, but ugh, what a boring existence that would be.

So due to Anon's actions there are now small suitcase nukes of disharmony going off all over Equestria, unless there's something special about Baltimare, which I doubt. I should be pleased with this. I don't personally approve of rape, but I do very much approve of me being more powerful, so from a selfish perspective this is a good thing for me. And, well, I had a lot of fun in Zebrica and a lot of fun in Ponyville when I first broke free, but I haven't had _this_ sort of fun in... you know, I don't even want to count up the years, because that would just be depressing. So again, from a personal perspective this did me nothing but good. Sure, rape is a fairly pathetic way to stir up disharmony, but I'm not the one committing it, and the proximate causes are being influenced against their control, and the ultimate cause is an entity I've already sworn to fight and I've already recognized as a pathetic loser with too much power, so this really shouldn't bother me at all.

I'm really having some difficulty figuring out why it does.

* * *

><p>Anyway! You don't want to hear about my personal dilemmas, and being that you undoubtedly <em>don't<em> draw energy from disharmony and would probably have significantly greater objections than I do to being kidnapped, tied up, and used as a pleasure toy, I've conveyed what I needed to here, which is that Anon's reign is even worse than I thought and even if you were okay with stallions being turned into mares you are probably not okay with those that remained stallions being gang-raped, so you should agree with me that Anon is totally evil and needs to be stopped. Right? That _is_ the point I was trying to make here, right? I mean, yes, it is (why am I asking _you_ what point I am trying to make? You're not even here, and odds are, if you're reading this, I'm dead, so it isn't even as if I'll get to meet you and ask your opinion of my writing.)

Back to my interviews with the Elements of Harmony, then. I decided to talk with Rainbow Dash next, after my abject failure with Fluttershy. This time, I thought, I'd go in with the explicit purpose, not just of gathering information, but of using Dash's loyalty to friends against her loyalty to her lover and driving a wedge straight down the center of her brain. Mentioning the terrible things that Anon had supposedly said about Rarity and Fluttershy should stir up some righteous anger against Anon, and playing on Dash's enormous ego might give me an excellent opportunity to make her jealous of her friends. We'd see what direction she'd fall in.

Predictably, I found her sleeping in a tree. It was going to be either that or a cloud, I'd guessed. I hovered above her, snapped up a cotton candy cloud, and made it rain chocolate milk all over her. (If I'd been thinking about what I was thinking, this might have tipped me off, but I'm not good at thinking about what I'm thinking even when I'm not being mind controlled into a predictable idiot.)

She rolled over and glared at me. "_DISCORD!"_

"Hahaha, look at that face! What an expression you have! Simply delightful! Excuse me." I stuck a glass under the cloud and let it fill with chocolate milk. "What's the matter, Rainbow Dash? I thought you liked pranks!"

She just growled at me. "How wonderful! Come on, give me that 'grr' face!" I chortled. I drank the glass and tossed the chocolate milk to the ground, where it exploded. "Growl for me, Rainbow, let me know you still care."

I dispelled the cloud and hovered above her, just a bit to her side. It was a bit surprising to me that she hadn't said anything, aside from shouting my name. "Well, you're certainly talkative today," I said. "What's the matter? Cat-"

Before I could finish the sentence, she lunged at me. The illusion dropped only seconds before the Element of Protection nearly skewered me. I dodged backward, genuinely startled to see that it was Anon in the tree. "This is different!" I said. "Can't say I was expecting-" He lunged for me again. This should have resulted in him ignominiously falling off the tree, but did not. A human shouldn't be able to just lay back in the top of a tree anyway - they're great at tree climbing, but it's because of their monkey arms. They can't twine themselves around a branch like I can and they can't use magic to treat the top of the tree as a solid object like pegasi can. I flew backward, and Anon followed me, floating in air. For a moment I was going to say something outraged about the unfairness of him suddenly developing _more_ random superpowers, but then I realized I recognized the magical aura around him.

I looked down. This was almost a mistake, as taking my eyes off Anon for even a moment nearly resulted in my losing a limb, but I saw Twilight Sparkle down below, her horn glowing. So she'd been responsible for the illusion, and she was levitating Anon.

"Did you think we wouldn't get wise to your tricks?" Anon shouted at me. "After what you did to Rarity, did you really think we wouldn't be prepared for you?"

"Honestly, given that you haven't found Luna yet, yes," I said. "You don't seem to be all that bright."

'You'll tell us where she is, monster, if I have to beat it out of you!"

With Twilight moving him telekinetically, I had no hope of evading him indefinitely. I could have run for it, but maybe he was affecting me... or maybe I was just being my usual self, assuming that he couldn't really hurt me because usually nothing could. He'd gotten in a lucky shot in our first encounter, but surely I could protect myself from a jumped-up human with a magic sword. I summoned another cotton candy cloud and connected it to Twilight, so it would follow her around. Without her being able to see me or Anon, she wouldn't be able to guide him toward me.

"Anon!" Twilight screamed. "I can't see you!"

"I'm up here still! I'm fine, but we need to get Discord!"

"But I can't see him! I have to bring you down, or he could hurt you! You can't fly on your own!"

I started chuckling. "She's got a point, pal. If you can't fly, you can't very well stick me with your overgrown butterknife, now can you?"

"Laugh while you can, Discord," Anon snarled at me as Twilight brought him down to the ground. "But we _will_ defeat you!"

"How are you going to do that when you can't reach me?" I asked mockingly.

"Like this!" a voice said above me, as something crashed into me with enormous speed and force. I felt the magic of a pegasus flight field shoving me down out of the sky, but dazed as I was from the blow of the pegasus slamming into my back in the first place, I couldn't concentrate. It only took seconds - I hadn't been all that high up - before I slammed into the ground, hard, a triumphant Rainbow Dash hovering over me.

"Plenty more where that came from, Dipcord!" she shouted down at me.

I was on the ground. Where Anon and his sword now were.

The phrase that went through my head was slightly less polite than "Oh dear," but you get the idea.

I tried to get up, but Rainbow Dash kicked me in the head. In my tumble back to the ground, I was able to see that Anon was running straight for me. This wasn't good. I was too dizzy to teleport, and if I went up Rainbow would likely attack me again. I needed to buy time.

For some mysterious reason I thought the appropriate way to do this was to summon a sword.

TRUE CONFESSION TIME: I am not a master of the art of swordsponyship. In fact I am fairly sure I'd never used one in my draconequus form for anything other than a prop. (When you walk the worlds, and sometimes find yourself in a completely different body shape in a different world, and your magic doesn't quite work the way you want it to, or possibly at all, sometimes it's convenient to have a weapon. But even then, most of my skill with a sword consisted of being able to keep myself from being skewered long enough to find a good direction to run away in.) So it was a mind-numbingly stupid idea for me to think I could take on _anyone_ with a sword. Admittedly Anon's skill with the blade was fairly crappy, and looked mostly like moves that look good in human movies but that human swordsmen would laugh at (I said I can't use a blade well myself, not that I can't recognize good technique when I see it, and his was not good technique.) But this had to be an improvement over _never_ having used a sword in combat while in my natural form.

Surprisingly, it was not. At the time I didn't question it. Now I realize that Anon's power must have wanted a dramatic fight. Because for a short while, I was golden. I wasn't using my chaos magic, but I felt as if the sword flowed from me as naturally as my claws might have. Like my talon extended into an invulnerable, insensate extension that wouldn't be harmed if Anon hit it with his sword, unlike my actual talon. I do have some natural aptitude for such things - I'm good at detecting weaknesses in someone else's defenses, at identifying patterns and disrupting them to my own advantage, and I'm extremely flexible and graceful. My arms weren't much longer than Anon's and I had to manage extra body parts that he doesn't have, keeping them out of his reach, but I could bend my body in ways he couldn't match, and the principle of taunting your opponent into an ill-conceived lunge and then taking advantage of his exposure is one that translates very well from combat with claws and teeth.

In fact I thought I would easily overpower him. Then my sword broke. More precisely, he sliced it in half. I might possibly have been taunting him at the time, and his sword might have started glowing just a trifle brighter, because what I felt was harmony magic slicing through the magic of my creation, fatally weakening it in the same moment as the two physical objects clashed. His sword went through mine like mine was a butter stick. (Which might be a more effective weapon against him next time, because if you wield a butter stick just right, you can ensure that when the opponent parries and slices through your butter, the giant pat they've just sliced off goes flying into their face.)

I spent one too many split seconds staring at the broken remains of my sword, and very nearly got skewered. As it was, his sword shaved some of the thicker fur on my belly and sides. I went sideways, rolled, and conjured a shield... which cleaved in half as easily as my sword had. The only thing that saved me _then_ was my ability to do the limbo - I was still on the ground, and when his sword went through my shield, it would have at the very least sliced my arm off and possibly gone through my face as well if I hadn't bent my body back flat against the ground. I then uncoiled my bottom half and whacked him with my tail while he was overextended, knocking him flat to the ground.

I went straight up - only to come straight back down again as Rainbow Dash plowed into me again and Twilight Sparkle dropped a rather large rock, somewhat reminiscent of Tom, on my lower back, below my wings but not quite to my tail yet. I do not actually have the extraneous padding that ponies, or humans, have at that particular junction, so the portions of my anatomy on the front of my body that were directly under this part of my back were crushed quite unpleasantly into the ground by the combination of the rock and my own weight. Yes, draconequui keep sensitive bits in a sheath with a bit of draconic scale covering and protecting it, under the fur, but that does not mean it was pleasant to have my hips and everything between them stomped into the dirt by the weight of the falling rock.

"Now who's laughing, Discord?" Anon shouted as he came at me again. I didn't have time to shake the rock off me and run, and I knew he could cut through anything I manifested from pure chaos. So I shaped the dirt under my paw into another shield and lifted it just in time to save myself from decapitation. The sword hit the shield... and made it fall apart into dirt again, thankfully taking some of its momentum and blunting it with mud globs so that when it hit my raised wrist, it hit like a hard, heavy stick and not like a blade. Hurt terribly, broke the bone and made me scream, but it didn't cut my arm off.

He had to take a moment to clean his blade off (on his shirt... _really,_ this fellow is uncouth.) This gave me a chance to turn the rock on my back to butterscotch pudding, allowing me to twist away from the mad human again. I healed my broken arm, just in time because there he was coming for me again. I couldn't summon a shield made of magic, his harmonics would cut right through it. I couldn't make a quick shield out of a substance that didn't naturally want to stay in the form of a single solid object, the harmonics had disrupted the magic that held the dirt in the form of a shield. I needed something that would stick together naturally, preferably something that would slow his sword and make it encrusted enough that it couldn't disrupt _my_ magic when it hit me.

I teleported the taffies I'd seen on the counter in Sugarcube Corner, in total desperation, and made them form into a shield just in time as he swung at me. A very thick, globby, taffy-ish shield. Much like Applejack's hooves had when she'd bucked me and I'd made myself partly taffy, the sword sank into it, and then Anon couldn't pull it back out.

"Discord! Damn you, what have you done with my sword?" He was waving it around with a gigantic glob of taffy stuck to it, making it useless as a sword.

"I fixed it!" I cackle at him. "In the sense of animal husbandry. Go ask Fluttershy what that means if you don't understand. Meanwhile I am _terribly_ late for my clawcure at the spa! Toodles!"

I'd finally gotten my head together enough to be able to teleport. So I did. And then I started writing this journal, because it had really sunk in for the first time that I could actually _die_ at this bozo's hands. The fact that a shallow slice against my chest had been enough to disrupt my magic temporarily the last time I'd fought him, and that his sword could go through my chaotic creations so easily by using harmony magic to destabilize whatever I created, meant that there was no guarantee I'd survive it if he actually managed to cut off my head or stab me. I was so badly shaken, in fact, that although my intent was to describe my opponent well enough that if I should fall in battle someone could pick up after me, that first journal entry actually said next to nothing about who this guy is or what form our fight had taken.

* * *

><p>So I've come full circle, finally caught up with the start of this journal, and I should really be going down to South Amaerica to retrieve my Element of Greed from a dragon down there, but for some reason what happened in Baltimare is still bothering me tremendously and I cannot for the life of me figure out why.<p>

I enjoyed myself. I could have stopped it at any point, and I didn't, because I wanted it. There is no sense in which anything bad, traumatic, unwanted or even embarrassing happened to me. I shouldn't be _dwelling_ on this... oh for the love of chaos, is this because something bad happened to my _character?_

Let me backtrack a bit. While I was imprisoned, I would, on occasion, make up imaginary ponies. Some of them, in fact most of them, were just there to be an audience or for me to taunt, but some were... hmm, I believe the term is "self-insertion characters"? They were, essentially, pony representations of some part of my personality. I had quite a few of them, but Twister was one of my favorites, because I actually came up with a lengthy backstory for him. See, I gave him a tornado for a cutie mark (hence his name, also there have been those who have called me "the Twister" or "Mind-Twister" for what should be obvious reasons), as a representation of chaos, but then I wondered what would a unicorn do with a weather-related cutie mark. So he's a weather-working unicorn, a delightfully contradictory concept in and of itself, who grew up in Canterlot but lives in Las Pegasus, where they have a lot more facilities for non-pegasi than Cloudsdale does. And, apparently, now he has two girlfriends who work at the Palace.

Yes, I know this is pathetic. I was trapped in stone. Don't judge me.

Nothing terrible happened to me, Discord; I quite enjoyed myself. But Twister was kidnapped and gang-raped. I feel very odd about this. I allowed it to happen, because he was nothing more than a fictional character I was playing, but... now I feel as if I've done something to hurt a pony that I actually care about, my own creation. It's ridiculous; I'm well aware he's fictional and I've made him up. Nothing terrible happened to him, either, because he's not _real_.

But he's an avatar of _me_. My ponysona, if you like (one of them, anyway). If I had truly been Twister, if I'd been a mere unicorn and not the magnificent draconequus that I am... I'd have found the incident horrifying, not arousing. I like to pretend I'm not in control, or to set off enough chaos that _no one_ is in control, including me, but to be dominated and controlled by someone else... by a _pony_... the very thought sickens me. And while I am hardly renowned for my empathy, I _do_ know that this is something that most ponies don't like either, which is one of the reasons it's so much fun to inflict it on them... so why is it bothering me that these mares are doing this to stallions I don't know and don't care about, when I myself enjoy a spot of terrorizing ponies by taking their control over their lives away from time to time? My objection to rape is that it's pathetic, not that I have some sort of _morality_ to adhere to... dear me, how could I live down the shame of subscribing to some sort of arbitrary control structure of the type ponies order their lives by? I'm completely amoral. I judge everything on whether it is fun for me or not, and whether it increases chaos and disharmony or not, and whether it does so in the long run or short run. I don't kill ponies because dead ponies aren't funny and they don't cause chaos. I don't eat meat because the same is true of all animals, whether they can talk or not; I got just as much fun out of my long-legged bunny rabbits as I did from my beautiful buffalo ballerinas, despite the fact that buffalo talk and bunnies do not.

Maybe because I've been thinking in terms of protecting ponies, being outraged that this creature from another world has warped them so thoroughly and they don't even have the freedom to know it. Maybe I'm bound to be contrary, and when my enemy is a paragon of kindness and goodness, I must be cruel, but when my enemy is wicked I must develop some virtue. I don't know. The whole thing is confusing me utterly, making me wonder if this is more of Anon's work... but Anon has no interest in turning me into some sort of _hero_. Whatever it is I'm feeling, it's coming from me. Somehow.

Well. Eventually perhaps it will be clear why I feel this way, or it won't, but the important thing is getting this out of my mind and following where my whims take me. And my whims are telling me that the situation with those mares is quite untenable and I will be restless unless I do something about it. So I think I'm going to go introduce a little chaos to the lives of some ladies in Baltimare, and _then_ I'll go get my Element of Greed.


	8. Catchup Is Not Just For Hayfries

_Potential trigger warnings: This chapter contains gore, and rape threats. _

* * *

><p>That really wasn't hard at all! I had quite a bit of fun with it, too.<p>

It wasn't hard to identify the waitress who'd kidnapped me - while all the waitresses at Something Different wear beehive hairdos (it's a Baltimare thing), I'd spent quite some time looking at this particular pony, from _all_ the angles. I'm not entirely sure which of the other waitresses were the specific three who joined in the fun - sometimes ponies all look alike to me, you know? But this one, I'd studied.

I followed her home. Mostly by flying slowly above her, invisible. Pegasi generally fly above the buildings - it's why Manehattan and Canterlot are the only pony cities dominated by tall structures. Baltimare's a port city, and ports live and die by the whims of the sailors coming to trade, and with their weather control abilities pegasi make up more than their fair share of sailors. (For some reason, _earth_ ponies don't appreciate being out on the water so much. Can't imagine why not.) So if you hover two average pony-heights in the air, the only pony you're likely to run into is Celestia (that mare has _amazing_ legs.) She lived alone, in a small apartment, presumably so that if she got lucky and found a boytoy she didn't need to drug into submission, she wouldn't have to arrange matters around a roommate's schedule. All the better for me.

I waited until she'd taken her skates off (can you believe she skated all the way home? But then, skating's also a thing in Baltimare), washed off the travel dust, and poured herself a drink. Hard cider. My my, our little friend liked to live it up in all kinds of ways, didn't she? I waited until she had a mouthful of cider and then appeared directly next to her (or, more precisely, most of my body curved over her back, part of my tail behind her, and my _face_ next to hers. Pony language actually is rather poorly designed for describing what I do with my body easily.) "Well, hello there!" I said to her cheerfully, as she spit out most of her cider and dropped her glass on the floor. "You ran off so quickly last time, you didn't even give me a calling card! How did you expect me to contact you for another date?"

The unicorn tried to step backward, backing away from me, which was silly because I was draped over her. I lifted my tail and twined it with hers so she wouldn't step on it. She shrieked and tried to lunge forward, which only brought her head and neck slamming into my neck, as I'd just circled her head with my neck so my face was now on her other side. "Oh my!" I said. "In a rush, are we? That's quite all right, though, I remember how quickly you wanted to get down to business last time!"

She tried to shriek, but what came out of her mouth was a word balloon, a jagged one with the word "AAAHHH!" written on it. "Ah-ah-ah," I said. "Don't want to disturb the neighbors. Now I wanted to make sure that we're communicating properly, because I feel as if we might have fallen down a bit on that last time, but we won't get to have _any_ fun if your landmare calls the cops. So I thought this would be a great way to make sure we can talk, without you being loud about it." I leered at her deliberately. "Maybe later I'll go with a traditional soundproofing spell. If I recall correctly you're quite the screamer!"

More word balloons spilled out of her mouth. "Please," they said mutely, in that kind of all-caps bold italic writing that you mostly only find in comic books. "Please, I'm sorry, please don't hurt me..."

"Hurt you? Now whyever would I want to do that?" I grinned at her. "We had so much fun the last time. All I want is a repeat engagement! But this time it's my turn to be on top. Don't worry-" I dangled a set of four leather cuffs, hoof-sized, with fur lining, in front of her. (These were conjured, of course - nothing died to provide this leather or fur - but I knew the mare would be able to smell that they were, actually, leather and fur. Maybe it's a bit overkill to be three times the size of a pony, with claws and teeth, and be the god of chaos, _and_ taunt the target with goods made of leather, but I was hankering for a bit of overkill, actually.) "I made sure to bring my own gear!"

She actually managed to toss me off her and run for the door. I teleported in front of her, grinning. "Oh! Is this the game we're playing?" She spun and tried to run again, and I intercepted her again. "This is fun! Tell me, did you ever do this with any of the stallions you loved and left down in your basement, or am I the first one you've ever played tag with?" She blasted me with magic, quite uselessly as her harmonic spell simply unraveled against my chaos field. Then she picked up a coffee table and threw it at me. I turned it into an ordinary, rain-bearing cloud and let it fall apart around me, leaving a puddle of rain on her apartment floor. "Mm, refreshing." She started throwing everything her magic could grab at me. I turned all of it into flowers. "My dear, you don't have to shower me with gifts," I said. "Just your presence is enough for me!"

At this point she fell to her knees and started crying, which was funny, because the word balloons were coming out with "*sob* *sob*". I picked her up in my tail and lifted her to my face again. "Crying? Just because I said you didn't need to give me flowers? You're definitely a high-maintenance sort of gal, you know that?"

The word balloons were coming out so fast they were falling over each other, as if she was babbling. More of the "please let me go" and "please don't hurt me" variety. I laughed. "Oh, you little minx. You're getting me back for how I played the part last time, aren't you? One would almost think you didn't _want_ me." I pulled her even closer, turning her slightly so I could breathe against her ear. "Of course we both know _that's_ not true. After you drugged me, and dragged me off, and tied me up, there isn't any question about you _wanting_ me, now is there?"

"You're a monster!" the next word balloon said.

"How rude! If you preferred the stallion form I wore last time, you could have asked _nicely._ Now I don't feel like switching into it. So there." I murmured directly in her ear. "Don't worry, though. I assure you, even in this form I'm completely compatible with ponies."

She sobbed harder, shaking her head back and forth. As amusing as this had been, I decided to bring the little charade to a close; when they start crying like that, you're not going to get much more variety in reaction out of them no matter what you do, and obviously I had no intention of doing what I was pretending I was going to do. "Wait, wait," I said. "No? You're saying no?" She nodded her head vigorously. "Oh, good, you're actually saying yes. I was worried-" More frantic headshaking, and word balloons saying "No, no, I don't want this, please," came falling out of her mouth. "You _don't_ want this?" She didn't fall for it this time; instead of nodding or shaking, she went with the word balloons saying "I don't, I don't want it, please don't touch me, please" and that sort of thing.

So I dropped her. "Well, _that's_ a surprise," I said. "After you wanted it so badly last time... oh. Oh, I know what your problem is." I nodded knowingly. "It's too soon, isn't it? It must be intense, playing rough like that. Well, I can see how a mare might need some recovery time after being with _me._ I'm sure you're _quite_ exhausted." I winked at her.

She stared up at me from the floor, a wonderful look of total confusion on her face, fear leavened by just a touch of hope. That's really where I like them to be, teetering just on the razor edge between despair and relief, when their minds are alive to _all_ the possibilities their future might hold, and they don't have the slightest idea which way it will go. "I tell you what," I said. "To be honest, this no-safewords play is a little bit edgy for me. It's fun, don't get me wrong, but I personally would feel just a little bit better if we had a signal. Something that doesn't interrupt the roleplay or ruin the immersion, but that makes it clear what we both want. Hmm."

Again she backed away from me, so I teleported to her and coiled around her again. "I have the perfect solution! I want to hear what you think of it." I snapped my talon, so she could talk again. She opened her mouth and tried to scream, but nothing but a hoarse croak came out. "What did I say about bothering the neighbors? I want to hear you _talk,_ not yell. Sheesh, my ears are right here."

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, please let me go, if I'd known who you were I wouldn't have gone near you, _please_..."

"Oh, my dear, if I believed that it would break my heart! To think you'd reject me so cruelly for my true appearance, after all we've meant to each other." I nuzzled her neck slightly, and she shuddered. "But I know you don't mean it. You're just playing the game! So let me know what you think of this for a signal."

I looked directly into her eyes. "I come back to your restaurant," I said. "I'm wearing a different form. Maybe I'm an earth pony this time. Maybe I'm a pegasus. We'll mix it up! I know, my true form is a little bit intimidating for mares, they can't quite handle so much concentrated sexy, so I'll downgrade just like I did before. Be more approachable." I leaned in close. "And all you have to do to tell me you're ready for funtime is to do exactly the same thing you did last time."

"...What?" she whimpered.

"Just that! If you're feeling kind of sore, if you're tired, got a headache, not in the mood? Just leave me alone. Take my order, bring me my food, and nothing extra. But if you'd like me to tie you up and demonstrate exactly what I can do with this tongue-" I waggled it at her- "just drug me or cart me off like you did last time! Hold me at knifepoint, hit me over the head, however you want to do it. The important thing is the verisimilitude. You'll play like you're overpowering me, and then I turn the tables on you and ravish you the same way you did to me, last time. Won't that be fun?" I grinned at her. "Though I'll probably take this form back once I've got you in my power. Hooves are all well and good but you don't know what you're missing if you've never experienced fingers." I did a little air piano in front of her to demonstrate.

"...please..."

"Yes, I can see how eager you are! But you're right, we don't have to play tonight, I'm sure I _thoroughly_ satisfied you yesterday." I leered at her again. "So the next time I'm in the mood, I'll come by, and if you're feeling frisky, just take me captive! And if you're not, then just treat me like an ordinary customer, no Happy Ending down in the basement, and I'll know you mean you're not up for it this time and I should come back another day. Sound good?"

"H-how will I know it's you?"

I laughed heartily. "You won't! Think of how gloriously unpredictable that will be! _Any_ fella you decide to show a good time to might be me! Or any lady-" at this point I released her and took the form of the model Fleur de Lis. "I can be quite a sexy mare if you decide your door swings both ways." Back in my own form, I leaned forward. "Hey, listen. I didn't get the addresses of your pals, but do let them know the offer's open to them as well. If you decide you're not up for it but any of them want a bit of fun, same deal - they can just take me captive and try to sex me up, and that'll be a pretty unmistakeable signal, don't you think? I mean, hard to misinterpret _that_ one." She started whimpering again. "Oh, cheer up, my dear, it's not every day you catch the attention of the god of chaos! Do you know, you were my first in a thousand years? Not by my choice, of course, it's just hard to get action when you're a stone statue. But believe me," I leaned even closer and murmured in her ear, "you were very, very memorable." (Side note: she wasn't. She was surprisingly vanilla for a rapist.) She shuddered, her eyes closing tightly and tears leaking out. "I'd wait for you for twenty years if that's how long it takes, dear heart. You could be an old, old lady, and all you'll have to do to get some fun is conk some fellow you don't know over the head... and it'll probably be me."

I let her go and teleported, half of the flower-strewn room between her and me. "In any case, since you're not in the mood tonight, I'll take my leave. But do remember me the next time you want to get wild with the date rape drugs, won't you? I'll be looking forward to it!"

And then I came back here.

I could be wrong - I am not always the best judge of pony behavior - but I feel safe in saying that that is a mare who will most likely never attempt to rape anypony, ever again.

But all good things come to an end. I've had my fun today; it's time to bite the bullet and tell you all the sad, sordid details of my de-tailing. (Which I am fully recovered from, thank you for asking. It doesn't even ache when I curl it tightly anymore.)

* * *

><p>So if you were paying attention, and I'm sure you were because how could you not be riveted to every word I write?, you certainly must remember how I talked about being consumed with a red-hazed hatred and desire to go charging off to wreak some nefarious vengeance, at the end of my first entry in this journal. I knew that I had to do something villainous, or the role Anon wanted to force me into would drive me into it, and if I was pushed rather than going of my own free will it was likely to be far stupider, and more dangerous for me, than something I chose to do.<p>

I chose to check up on Woona. Because really as a good little villain I should be gloating at her, and giving her the opportunity to say "You'll never get away with this!" so I can say "On the contrary, my dear, I already have... muwahahahaha!" and suchlike. More seriously I wanted to talk to her about Anon. If she hadn't broken free of the dreamworld I inceptioned her into by now, then either Anon made her seriously, seriously stupid, and pointing out her own incapacity to her might get the wheels turning... or she was eager to remain in a dreamworld and wasn't fighting hard to return to reality, which sounded like either a weakness I could exploit, or a subconscious awareness that she was being screwed over in real life.

By this point it had been nearly two weeks since my first confrontation with Anon. I was frankly astonished Luna had remained imprisoned for so long. I mean, I know I'm good, but _that_ good? I impress even me. I was also rather shocked that nopony (or human) had bothered to check the Castle of the Two Sisters. Really, how does that level of stupidity even survive?

Luna was still asleep on the floor of the castle. I _had_ provided her with a bed, and an adorable blankie, and a lacy, frilly nightgown so ridiculously long that it would have dragged on the ground if _I'd_ worn it, mostly because I'd wanted to see Luna try to jump to her feet in a battle posture, get tangled in her nightgown, and faceplant. But all of these accoutrements had vanished, either because of the general impermanence of chaos magic and the fact that it had been two weeks, or because one of my narrow escapes from Anon had disrupted it. However, this had not woken her up. She was still lying peacefully on the castle floor, her chest rising and falling and the eyes behind her lids moving about jerkily, but no other movement. It puzzled me. I knew she was quite all right - an alicorn in a magical sleep won't need food, water, or a potty break any more than a sleeping dragon would - but I was surprised that she was still under. I'd half expected the moon to awaken her on the first night, let alone this far in.

Carefully - I'm not _completely_ incautious - I stepped into her dream.

The quality of the weave amazed even me. I'd built this dream for her, but she'd taken it over at some point, making it rich and vivid to the point of hyper-reality. It wasn't hard to see why she hadn't broken free of it, either, as the very first thing I saw in the dream was an evening parade in Luna's honor, revering her for a military victory against the caribou. Soldiers and freed slaves marched in the parade, ponies threw white lilies and moonflowers in front of her chariot, and the air was filled with the sound of laughter and cheering and marching bands and excited foals shouting at each other, "Look! Look! It's the _Princess!_"

Luna has issues.

The similarity to what Anon had done to the world did not escape me. As I observed the dream further, however, I recognized that Luna made a much better god than Anon did. Her heroic exploits were actually in character, very similar to things she had actually done in her existence. The evils she spent her time challenging were mostly real, societies that Celestia had chosen to leave alone and self-ruling out of realpolitik, and I was sure the inability to crush slavers and topple tyrants as she'd done in the past, now that Celestia had created such a peaceful, orderly society, was grating to Luna. She didn't take on the sort of threats that brought out the Element Bearers; in the dream, she had become good friends with Twilight Sparkle and was engaged in teaching her some of the things Celestia had not, such as battle magic and shadow weaving and how to safely use dark magic. (This might have been questionable in real life. Celestia's opinion was that the only way to safely use dark magic was to never do it, and the fact that Luna herself had fallen didn't make the _best_ argument for Luna's perspective on the matter.) Luna fought armies, at the head of armies of her own, and there was blood and there was sacrifice and there was death aplenty, and the fact that Luna always returned in triumph to the cheering of crowds didn't change the fact that at least it had been a hard-won battle.

I also noticed, interestingly, that Anon _wasn't anywhere in the dream._

I waited until Luna was ready to retire for the morning, and popped into her bedroom. "Nice blackout curtains! With soundproofing, no less! These are nice digs, Luna, I can see why you slept right through my first little jailbreak."

"_Discord!_"

She snarled at me and fired a bolt of moderately dark grey magic, which had it hit me might have even done something, but I swung my tail up with a baseball bat in it and hit her magic with a good thwack, causing the bolt to fire off at the wall instead. The wall became encased in thick webbing. "Ooh! Bondage! Luna, you minx, you." I snapped my talon and covered her horn with a magic-suppressing party hat, unleashed a storm of confetti, and blew one of those roll-out noisemakers at her. Luna wasted several minutes pawing uselessly at the rubberband holding the party hat on her head, attempting to bring her hoof to bear against it in the absence of magic. Which would almost certainly have worked if I hadn't glued it to her coat, but without the dexterity of magic (or _hands!_) she couldn't budge it. "Now, now, Luna, I came here to party! Or was that parley? I always mix those words up."

"I have nothing to say to you, monster! How can you even be alive? I saw Anon destroy you!"

"Yeah, funny about that. Where _is_ our favorite monkey with the hairtrigger temper, anyway? I haven't seen him around here, have you?"

She scowled at me. "I recall a rumor that you can restore yourself from the dead. Perhaps your time in the Shadowlands kept you from noticing, then. Having destroyed you, Anon returned to his own world, for it was you who were holding him here."

A _rumor?_ Luna knows I can come back from the dead. She's seen me do it. Of course, Luna also believes that the first time I did it, I wasn't the same being when I came back - literally, she thinks I'm some sort of dybbuk of Chaos running around in a copy of the original Discord's body. And to think, she's never actually read the X-Men's Dark Phoenix saga! But she shouldn't be thinking of my talent for cheating death as a _rumor_. (At this point, you are no doubt wondering, "But Discord, if you're so fantastic that you can restore yourself from the dead, why are you even afraid of Anon?" And the answer is, when he attacks me with that sword it disrupts my magic, and my ability to come back from the dead is very much contingent on my ability to die with my magic intact. I've never tried it, for obvious reasons, but I _strongly_ suspect that if I die without magic or with my magic in more disarray than it is usually, I'll stay dead. And the Shadowlands are a very, very, very, very, very boring place. Admittedly slightly more entertaining than being a statue, but only slightly.) Also, the notion that _I'd_ be keeping Anon here is laughable. But it was very interesting that Luna had kicked Anon out of her dream, in a way that made sense within the story he'd turned all of Equestria into, and without rejecting the high opinion of him that had been forced on her, but conveniently ensuring he would not be around so Luna could be the hero instead of Anon. Luna has a greater talent for seeing through illusions than any other pony I know, far better than Celestia's. Maybe some part of her was subconsciously seeing through Our Hero's façade?

"Well, now, that's just a silly idea. Why would I have wanted to keep Anon here?" I remembered then that Luna hadn't been awake when Anon had disrupted my power the first time. "He's so stolid! Maybe he needs to grow a beard."

"Cease your nonsense and _leave_, Discord!"

"Ca-an't make me," I caroled at her, swishing my hips in a little dance. "But let's talk about Anon." I flashed her onto a psychiatrist's couch, with myself in a chair next to it. "Zis 'Anon' fellow, he is gute friend of yours, ja?"

The chair came to life and grabbed me, its "arms" turning into clawed hooks that clamped around mine, and straps snapping closed around my middle. Impressive! Of course, Luna has more control of the environment within a dream than I do, but I hadn't realized that that would be the case even if she didn't know it was a dream.

"I have been practicing, Discord," she said. "Honing my magic, fighting against the enemies of Equestria, the enemies of friendship and justice. I believe I am _much_ closer to a match for you than you remember me."

This was actually not very good. Not only did Luna have more control over the dream than I did, but she had made up an excuse for herself why she could warp reality. And when I tried to free myself of the dream, I felt her will bearing down on me, holding me in place. In the past I'd run around fairly freely within Luna's dreams, over a thousand years ago when I was in stone but she wasn't yet on the moon, because I'd known about her dream powers and kept moving so she couldn't affect me with them. But I'd made the mistake of assuming she couldn't use them when she didn't know it was a dream. Apparently that wasn't the case.

"How splendid for you," I said grumpily. "Here I come just to have a friendly chat with you, and you _repeatedly_ try to tie me up. Why, Lulu, if I didn't know better, I'd swear you were propositioning me." I waggled my tongue at her. "Or _are_ you?"

"Keep thy tongue in thy mouth, foul beast, or I shall remove it forthwith!" she said furiously, charging up her horn... which meant that, since she was preparing to blast me _in_ the dream and not manipulate the dream itself around me, my bonds were probably weaker. I proved it by teleporting out of them.

"Luna, Luna, Luna. This is getting us nowhere. I just came to chat with you about Anon."

"What doth he matter to thee? I shall tell thee nothing!"

When Luna goes all thee and thou, she's _really_ riled up. She's a lot better about using modern parlance when she's calm. "Oh, just about the fact that he's not really gone, you're only dreaming that he has, and in the meantime he's warped all Equestria into some twisted theatre for a play he's putting on about what a big hero he is."

"What? Anon has been gone many a year! How dare thee speak such a transparent lie to me!"

"Now Luna, when have my lies ever been transparent? You're in a _dream_, Princess. You've been in one for nigh-on two weeks of real time. How do you think you got so much more powerful than you'd ever been before? Seriously, the fact that you can challenge me for even a moment should tell you I'm telling the truth."

She stared at me. "I cannot be in a dream, Discord; you lie, still. I am the Princess of Dreams; I surely would have noticed."

"Nope! Because I'm better than you are at making a _realistic_ dream, and your mind just ran with it. You've been in here for several years, haven't you? And you haven't noticed _anything_ strange?"

"No, and that is proof of your lies! I would never be deceived into thinking a dream is reality!" She blasted me - I should have seen it coming, she'd been holding the charge in her horn for some time, but frankly I'd assumed she wasn't going to do anything because Luna isn't known for her patience. I went flying through the wall, which actually hurt, though in reality it probably wouldn't have. Much.

"Nice one, Lulu." I picked myself up. "But how do you think you managed to do that if this is real?"

"We have struck blows against you before, foul monster."

"With your sister's help, yeah, but on your ownsome, you're not all that, sweetheart." Luna has a sophisticated range of very unusual magics that the average unicorn simply cannot do no matter how hard they train, while Celestia has, basically, straightforward unicorn magic. But Celestia has a lot more raw power than Luna does. Celestia alone can do me some damage, sometimes, if I'm not paying attention, but Luna alone cannot, a subject of incredible frustration to her over the centuries.

"You assume that Luna is alone," a voice that sounded very much like Luna's, but deeper and strangely affected, said. "I assure you, she is not."

Great. So because this was a dream, Moonie was able to show up in it as an independent entity. She strode forward out of a conveniently placed shadow. "Hey girl!" I said. "Long time no see. You look _fabulous._ Have you been getting underage female humans to style your hair again?"

"Be quiet, insolent whelp!" She fired another bolt at me. That one actually hurt, too.

"Luna, did it ever occur to you that Nightie there shouldn't be running around in an extra body if this _isn't_ a dream?" I pointed out.

"'Tis but another thing that happened whilst thou wert dead." She smirked. "Anon brought out Moon's soul e'en before thou and I battled, and reformed her, and after thy death, he and Twilight worked together to grant her a new body so she need not reside solely in my head."

Right. Anon reformed Nightmare Moon. And I'm a turnip. And Luna speaking like a time capsule again suggested she was under some sort of stress that she hadn't been under moments before Nightie appeared, when she'd been managing to remember her you's. Methinks _some_ part of Luna doesn't truly love Anon nearly as much as she thinks she does.

"Now, prepare yourself to return to the Shadowlands once more, base creature! And this time, don't return!" Nightmare Moon snarled, and she and Luna both charged up their horns.

This was going to be a bit of an ow, I thought. "Go ahead, girls, make my day." I put up a mirror field, one that in real life would have sent their magic bouncing in all kinds of crazy directions.

Instead it cut through my mirror field like a watergun through paper. "Oh, pooh," I said, and then the combined force of the beams turned me to ice and shattered me.

And then I opened my eyes, still sitting on the floor of the Castle of the Two Sisters, while Luna smiled in her sleep, no doubt doing a happy dance with her alter that she had once more heroically destroyed a threat to Equestria. The thing about dying in a dream, contrary to many bad comic books and plays, is that it doesn't kill you; it wakes you up. The humans' fiction eventually figured this out, which is funny, because humans really can't walk in dreams not their own, whereas ponies actually _can_ and yet this myth that dreamwalkers can die in a dream persists.

I was obviously not going to get anywhere with Luna as long as she was dreaming. On the other hand, if I woke her up, then I'd have to go to all the effort of holding her prisoner. Feeding her, keeping her locked up, making sure she didn't try any clever escape tricks, oh, it's all so boring. I never held a prisoner longer than a day or so because I just couldn't be bothered. I needed leverage. So I picked her up with my magic (what? I wasn't going to do it with my arms, alicorns are _heavy._ It's not like I lift or anything) and carried her outside, into the Everfree Forest.

Then I re-entered her dream. "That _hurt,_ Luna," I said.

She was in the middle of preparing for some speech, to give at evening's fall to a crowd of adoring citizens, when I popped in on her. She whirled on me in fury. "_WHY WON'T YOU STAY DEAD?!"_ she screamed, and blasted at me multiple times. This time I was ready for her, and dodged all of them.

"Because you never killed me in the first place," I sneered at her. I snapped my paw and collected her horn and wings; it was repetitive, but in this particular case I was consciously choosing the repetition. She'd have a much harder time lucid-dreaming her way out of one of my stunts if it was one she fully believed she couldn't counter in real life. "Luna, I am _tired_ of this. I came here to talk to you, but since you refuse, I've brought an ultimatum." I sensed Moonie preparing to ambush me, and snapped, making her reappear in front of the both of us as a small foal. "And you! If you want to have an independent body so badly, how about you do it the way the rest of us have to? It's hardly fair. If _I_ had to live through awkward years of being a child, then so do you."

The small foal stomped her little hoofsies in rage. "How dare you treat me this way? I am NIGHTMARE MOON!"

"Yes, yes, Moonie, the grownups are talking here," I said. "Luna. You are dreaming. I have taken your body from the safe place I'd stashed it in and I've dumped it in the Everfree Forest, sleeping. If you don't want to wake up in a manticore's gullet, you will shut up, sit down and _listen._"

"You wouldn't dare," she snarled at me.

"Oh, try me. You've used up _all_ my patience, Lulu, and you know well I never had much in the first place."

"You are bluffing!" squeaked Goodnight Moon. "This isn't even a dream!"

"Can you take the risk?" I ignored the Mooninite and hung down upsidedown next to Luna, my head upright and speaking in her ear. "If I'm lying to you, and you fall for my bluff, all that happens is you have to listen to me. But if you try to call my bluff, and I'm _not_ lying, you could end up as hydra chow. Can't very well defend yourself if you're asleep, now can you?"

"Very well, then, miscreant." Let it never be said that Luna is not liberal with the use of the classy insults. "Speak, and do not further try our patience."

"Did you know that when Anon came to this world, two thirds of all the stallions in Equestria were transformed to mares, and none of them remember it?"

Luna glared at me. "If you have something _serious_ to speak of, then do so!"

"Oh, I'm quite serious, believe me. Census records, newspaper archives... there's actually evidence that what I'm telling you is true. Once you wake up you can check it."

She snorted. "And of course 'twould never be your way, to _fake_ the evidence."

I laughed. "Of course 'twould, had I but the power to make such a thorough, detailed, _orderly_ change," I said, mocking her archaic speech. (Yes, I talked like that once too, but I was around in Canterlot Gardens listening to ponies talk while the language was evolving. Also I've always been better at adapting to change than Luna is.) "But I don't. I don't even have the power to change the sex of millions of ponies, let alone alter the memories of every pony in Equestria. I'm good, but I have limits. Apparently Anon does too, but his are above mine, as much as it pains me to admit it."

She stared at me as if I had three heads. Which occasionally I do. "Discord, you're madder than ever before. Anon has no such power. He bears the Element of Protection, that is all."

"Luna. Focus. _What_ Element of Protection? You've been to the Tree, you've seen the markings on it. Was there ever an Element of Protection there?"

"The Element of Protection is the lost Seventh Element. It was not _on_ the Tree when Celestia and I went there to defeat you."

"But all the Elements have to work together! How could you have defeated me if you were missing an Element?"

Little Moonie laughed. Amazing how obnoxious that laughter sounds when coming from a knee-high filly. "Oh, poor Discord! Are you troubled by something that _doesn't make sense_ to you?"

I was about to make an undoubtedly devastatingly witty comeback when I felt a certain sense of unease. I broke the dreamwalking spell and opened my eyes, just in time to see Anon rushing at me, howling a battle cry, with his sword over his head.

"Yeep!" I teleported straight up. (Don't try this at home, colts and fillies; I was in the thick of the Everfree Forest. A unicorn who tried that stunt would have quickly learned what it was like to be a tree.) From the safety of a branch a good bit over Anon's head, I peered down. "You _finally_ bothered to come looking at the castle? Finally? On the _one day_ I come here to check up on Woona? This is _completely_ unfair!"

He sneered at me. "You just think it's unfair because you're not winning!"

"Well, yes, of course, me not winning is the very definition of - oh, how are you even climbing that tree with a _sword?_" It hung at his side, making "ting" noises every time it struck against his armor (did I forget to mention he was wearing his armor? Obviously, he was prepared for me, but how? _I_ hadn't even known I was going to check up on Luna until the moment I decided to do it.) It was large and unwieldy and should definitely be preventing him from making his way up a heavily vine-overlaid and bush-crowded tree, and if the sword wasn't getting in his way, the armor should have.

I floated off the tree, out of his reach. Under the canopy of the overgrown trees, I was fairly confident that Rainbow Dash wasn't going to be able to appear out of nowhere and barrel into me. "I suppose I shouldn't be shocked that you can climb trees under these conditions," I said. The thing I intended to say right after that was, "You've warped everything else in the world to your convenience, why not give yourself magical tree climbing powers?" What came out of my mouth was "I suppose they teach you this sort of thing in monkey kindergarten, right? Do you all start shimmying up trees as soon as you can walk?"

"Is that supposed to be an insult?" he snickered at me, as I blinked, trying to figure out why I hadn't said what I meant to say, and for that matter remember what I _had_ meant to say. "Tree-climbing _is_ one of humanity's talents." He jumped down from the tree, at a height that really should have gotten him hurt given the armor he was wearing, but it was as if the armor was as light as his clothing - it didn't seem to be impeding him at all. "So is making use of tools." Abruptly there was a large rock in his hand - I hadn't even seen it get there - and he flung it, with uncanny accuracy, directly at my eye.

I reeled back, but kept enough presence of mind to keep levitating. How had he just taken me by surprise? How had he _hurt_ me with an entirely non-magical missile? "Oh, you think you're clever, don't you, Anon?" I snarled down at him. "Any ape can throw a rock. But I'll bet you can't hit what you can't see." I summoned a cotton candy cloud and made it rain chocolate milk on him, drenching him, as I lay down on top of the cloud. It was dense enough that I knew nothing he could throw at it would penetrate through to me, not before I sensed it coming at any rate.

He started climbing a tree again, plainly trying to get above my cloud. Now he really should _not_ have been able to climb the tree, because the torrent of chocolate rain should have made the tree far, far too slippery, but this didn't seem to faze him. "Oh, persistent," I chuckled. "I'm sure they'll make a movie of your exploits. They could call it-" I had planned to finish that sentence with "the Man with No Name", but instead I found myself saying, "The Best Tree-Climber In Equestria."

Frustration boiled over. "How are you _doing_ that?" I shouted at him.

"Doing what?" he smirked.

"Blocking what I planned to say and making me say something else," was what I wanted to say. Instead I said, "Climbing that tree! The chocolate milk should have made it far too slippery!"

"Like I said. Humans are _great_ at climbing trees."

Instinctively I backed away from him (though I left the cloud in place). Now that this had happened three times in rapid succession, I was starting to be able to remember the things I had wanted to say. Enough about them that I was picking up a pattern. Deliberately I opened my mouth to say, "Why _do_ they call you Anon, anyway?" and instead said, "Fortunately for me you're not very good at flying."

This time I remembered, and in remembering, I was able to recognize the pattern. I couldn't make a comment about Anon's name. I couldn't talk about his powers. Any time I tried, even if I concentrated on what I wanted to say, something completely different, but relatively apropos, would come out of my mouth. It wasn't that these weren't things I _would_ say, although some of them were lame enough that my internal is-this-actually-funny censor would have cut in and blocked them had I chosen to say them. (The Best Tree-Climber In Equestria? Really?) It was just that I hadn't planned to say them. And it was disorienting every time it happened, and hard, very hard, to remember what I'd _actually_ been planning to say.

Anon tried leaping at me, from the tree. This didn't do him very much good; I was well out of his way. He landed, with no sign that jumping down from that distance had done him the slightest bit of harm. Ponies could fall from that distance without injury but ponies were infused with magic; I'd thought a human would be more fragile. But of course, I kept forgetting. Anon _was_ infused with magic, the magic of twisting events so they went the way he wanted them to.

"Discord, you coward!" he shouted. "Come on down here and fight like a man!"

"Oh, you mean with no magic, and pointy sticks that I don't have? That certainly sounds fair. Tell you what, why don't you toss that sword into the bushes? _That_ would make it much more fair. No magic for you _or_ me, just bare fists and claws. Oh, wait, your claws aren't very sharp, are they?" I toss him down a nail file. "You want to work on that?"

"If you weren't such a coward, you wouldn't be afraid to face me!"

I felt a burning rage, entirely out of proportion to his taunts, and an overwhelming desire to make him eat those words. Call me a coward, would he? I'd show him!... but I managed to cling to just enough of my rationality to realize what a terrible idea it was to let that rage consume me. Anon, or more precisely Anon's power, wanted me to attack him. And more specifically it wanted me to attack him in the most bone-headed of comic book villainous ways. I didn't _care_ if he thought I was a coward; in my experience that taunt always means "Come fight me in a way that gives me the advantage over you!" I mean, earth ponies used to taunt unicorns and call them cowards for_ using magic in combat instead of their hooves._ Chew on the stupidity of that for a moment.

I freely admit, if wanting to fight from my own advantage and not my enemy's is cowardice, call me a lily-livered chicken then. I have no interest in fighting fair; I am _all_ about the fights that are totally unfair and in my favor. When I'm not fighting for my life against a more powerful opponent, I do give out handicaps to make the games more fun, but as soon as there's some chance an opponent might _hurt_ me, well then, no more Mr. Fair Play Draconequus. So his words should have been meaningless to me, along the same lines as "You monster" and "What in the name of the seven rings of Tartarus are _you_ supposed to be?" and "But if you do that, there'll be total chaos!" (Actually that last one is meaningful, it just means the exact opposite of what the pony saying it thinks it means. Since they usually think it's supposed to _dissuade_ me.) And yet, I felt a disproportionate fury, and I was barely able to restrain myself from dropping to the ground and inviting him to do his worst.

Instead, I decided that if this was a fair fight, his ability to harm me should be counterbalanced by me actually harming him, not just taunting him or twisting reality around him. So I made it rain baseballs.

The result of this, while hilarious, was less damaging to my opponent than I'd have hoped. Anon started using the flat of his sword as a bat, smacking baseballs out of the air. Some of them, he even managed to make fly toward me, though I dodged fairly easily. With him fully occupied, I descended closer to the ground so I could see his face better, which improved his ratio of smacking balls toward me, but I easily redirected them into curve balls that curved around me. "Swing, batta batta batta! Swing batta!" I chanted at him, laughing.

It was hysterically funny to watch him swinging a sword around as if it were a baseball bat. Also a little unnerving; he moved too fast. It was almost as if he had extra arms - I don't mean he actually did have extra arms and they were just invisible or something, I just mean that the speed he was hitting these things at gave the impression that he was in multiple places at once. So, since I was getting bored with watching the baseball game, I turned him into an octopus, dispelling the baseball-dropping cloud as I did so.

I completely lost it and fell over on the ground laughing as the octopus - we're not talking a giant octopus here, we're talking a perfectly normal octopus, like the size of a pony's head - attempted to lift the now-massive sword with its small tentacles, glaring at me with all the fury a small octopus can muster up. It was easily the funniest thing I'd seen in _days._ Even now, knowing that my reaction to the sight might have been influenced by Anon's power, I _still_ think it was unbearably funny.

What happened next was not so funny. Anon the octopus leaped at me, still somehow holding his sword, and because I was down on the ground in hysterics, I didn't see him in time. He latched onto my head with most of his tentacles, the rest of them attempting to maneuver his sword into position that he could stab me or something, though it was so large and unwieldy for a small octopus that he couldn't quite manage. I shrieked, my first reaction being to attempt to pull him off my face with my talon, but octopi have some grip to them. I flew up, fast, straightening as I went, but Anon's grip on my head only tightened, and since he was lying on top of my nostrils and his tentacles were wrapped around my muzzle, I couldn't breathe. In an utter panic, I turned the octopus into a bunny rabbit.

Octopi have a very, very powerful grip. Bunnies, not so much. He fell off my face easily, his sword dropping from his paw and plonking to the ground with a crystalline "tink" noise, looking even more enraged than he had when he was an octopus. I burst out laughing again at how ridiculous he looked.

"Who's a cutesy-wutesy bunny-wunny? You are!" I said, giggling. "Oh, Fluttershy! Here's a new pet bunsie-wunsie for you!"

He hopped around infuriated, glaring up at me, making chattering rabbit noises. Then he hopped up on top of Luna, who was still sleeping (honestly, how does that mare sleep through a _fight_ going on around her, with chocolate rainstorms no less? She was drenched and lying in a puddle of soggy mud and _still asleep_), and tried to use her as leverage to leap up to me... which was even funnier, and I lost it again. At least I stayed in the air as I convulsed with laughter, this time.

And then I decided to float down and boop his nose. "You are just the most _adorable-"_

This was the part where he leapt up onto the top of my head and bit me, hard.

I yelped and swatted at him, but he'd wrapped his paws around my antler, so it proved to be surprisingly difficult to dislodge him. I landed, no longer able to focus on levitating, and shook my head wildly, pulling at the rabbit at the same time. He shouldn't have been strong enough to stay latched on through all that, but he was.

After a few moments of flailing, I did what I should have done first - I snapped my talon and teleported him off me, simultaneously changing him into a hamster and sticking him in a wheel. For a few moments he tried to escape by running, which of course is exactly what a hamster wheel is for. I'd healed the rabbit bites on my head by then, of course, so I was fully free to point and laugh at Hamsterman.

Then he did something blatantly impossible. He leapt up to the top of the hamster wheel, grabbed its spokes with his tiny paws, swung his lower body hard enough to fall _out_ of the hamster wheel (it wasn't fully enclosed, only the bottom portion), and then, as I gaped at him (people who are not me are not supposed to _do_ completely impossible things), he _picked up the wheel_ and chucked it at my head.

I hadn't made him into a super-strong hamster, and yet, he was demonstrating more strength and flexibility than a hamster body _has._ I admit, I was stunned enough (and probably, impaired by his powers enough) that I simply stood there, staring at him, until the hamster wheel hit me directly in the eye.

Just because I can regenerate injury doesn't mean that getting hurt doesn't hurt. I reeled back with a startled scream and reverted my magic. This disintegrated the offending hamster wheel, but allowed Anon to pop back into his human form.

He wasted no time. By the time I'd healed my eye and looked back down, I didn't see Anon. I turned my head, and he was behind me, running straight at me with the sword. Under most circumstances, my instinctive reaction when someone is charging to attack me is to teleport, or dodge, but somehow every time I'm in danger from Anon, I seem to forget I can teleport.

Instead of doing something sensible like teleporting, and instead of doing something like what I'd done last time and teleporting taffy or something into the way, and instead of grabbing Luna and using her as a living shield (which I might not have wanted to do anyway, because he might not have been able to stop his charge, and I'd really rather not see wittle Woona dead), I swung my tail at him, planning to grab his sword arm and wrench the sword away from him, and possibly the arm as well. I think. I think that's what I was thinking, anyway.

I'm used to having the fastest reaction time of all the creatures I know, when I'm actually in combat and not, well, laughing at my enemies too hard to realize they're actually a threat. Against any other opponent, that trick would probably have worked. But Anon was faster than me.

For the first split second I didn't even feel pain. I felt unbalanced, literally - I'd been in the middle of swinging my tail toward him and then something had happened to throw off my balance and wait I hadn't elongated or warped it so why was my tail all the way over there?...

And then the pain hit, and I started screaming.

There was blood, everywhere. Blood pouring out of the piece of my tail that was lying on the grass a few heads away from me. Blood pouring out of _me_, in giant irregular spurts. Anon's sword, covered in blood; his face and armor, spattered with it. "Who's laughing now, Discord?" he said - laughing at me, so obviously the answer was him. "Is it funny now?"

I couldn't levitate. I twisted around to grab the half a tail I had left - and screamed, my paws burning as I touched it. It was glowing white. Still spurting blood everywhere, but now it was burning with the paradoxic heat that the energies of Harmony inflict on me every chance they get, the sensation of being freezing cold and burning hot at the same time. I was terrified, thinking I was turning to stone again, and I ran a few steps on all fours, stumbling, as if I could somehow run away from it, but of course it was attached to me. The sensation was growing worse. I looked over at the severed piece of my tail and became even more frightened. It was glowing, even more brightly, and _flaking_, crumbling into shiny bits of light and flying away in the breeze. When I looked back at the part of my tail that was still attached to me, I saw the same thing was happening to the very edge of it, and the glow was slowly burning its way up my body.

I wasn't turning to stone. I was _disintegrating._

Up to that point I'd just been screaming in pain. When I realized what was actually happening, I started screaming the word "No!", over and over again. And Anon was laughing at me darkly, and Luna was _finally_ starting to wake up, and it hurt so much and there was so much blood and the glow crawling up my tail was going to hit certain portions of my body before any others and I'm sorry, I realize this is darkly comic in afterthought, but if you don't feel a special surge of horror at the thought of a burning disintegration ray crawling over your genitals, you are probably a golem, or a tree. And I kept trying to _run away_ from it, like a dog trying to escape cans tied to his tail, or smack at it to put it out, but when I touched it with my paws it made my paws burn too. I... may well have been sobbing by this time. I have a surprisingly good memory given what I am, but this particular event comes back to me as a collection of incredibly vivid snapshots, each one full of all the things I was feeling at the time, but nothing connecting them.

I remember Anon still laughing, saying, "Poor baby. Why don't I put you out of your misery?" and coming for me with the glowing sword again. I remember screaming something (it was probably "no" again). I remember being back in this cave - I don't remember teleporting, but I must have - with control of my magic back, but no matter what I did with my magic the glow just kept burning up my tail. I remember sitting on the floor, sobbing, watching my tail burn and realizing what I had to do to save myself. I don't remember summoning a sword of my own, but I remember swinging it down before I had a chance to have second thoughts or flinch at what I was about to do to myself. I remember that it hurt much, much worse than the first cut Anon made, but the pain was flesh tearing and bones breaking and the shock of impact. Not burning.

I remember watching the piece I'd just severed myself sizzling into nothingness on the floor. I remember hyperventilating, watching the attached part bleed, waiting to see if it would start burning again, and breaking down in tears of relief when it didn't.

I remember looking up from the floor, disoriented and in more pain than I could easily remember, wondering why I was lying there and where did all the blood come from and then I remembered. I must have passed out from shock on the floor. Try as I might I couldn't regenerate the injury. I struggled up to a sitting position (sort of; actually sitting was incredibly painful), and summoned up bandages, which was much harder than it ought to have been, and tied them around the end of my tail as tightly as I could, trying to tourniquet it. If I couldn't stop the bleeding I was going to have to cauterize the wound and I really, _really_ did not want to inflict any further injury on it.

I had very little magic, and very little energy, and I wanted to just collapse back on the floor and sleep, but I was afraid that if I did I wouldn't wake up. I couldn't restore my lost blood magically, either, and I was really, really cold. Fortunately, being the creature of luxury that I am, I already had a sizable assortment of blankets, a fireplace, and all the equipment I needed to start a perfectly mundane fire to warm up beside. I figured, what I needed to do was eat raw meat, drink a lot of liquid, and stay awake long enough to confirm that I wouldn't die in my sleep from shock and blood loss. To that end, I started writing my journal entry above, and now we're all caught up.

Edited to add: this first version of this was a lot shorter. This was an exceedingly humiliating and painful episode so I really just skidded through it at high speed with "and then I did this and he did this and I did this and he cut off my tail and you know the rest." Since you have the luxury of reading this in order, you haven't gotten to the reason why I bothered to revise it to add so much gory detail, yet. That'll be next chapter, same Discord time, same Discord channel!

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><p>Well. That was stressful to even think about! Now I know why I put this off for so long. Sheesh, I have no idea how Daring Do manages it.<p>

Time I went down south to collect my Element of Greed, I think. That ought to be _fun._ And then maybe I'll drop in on Celestia. After all, Anon doesn't know I'm collecting the Elements of Disharmony, so I have to make some sort of villainous appearance so he knows I haven't forgotten about him, right?


End file.
